A Shadow's Little Light
by xXxJazzy B. RealxXx
Summary: Mankind will never forget how Shadow saved Earth. A year after his death, this has proven to be mankind's lie, and Sonic is the one outraged. When Amy finds Shadow's body, they're all forced on a journey of soul-searching, and there will be blood.
1. The Premature Heroine

**# Disclaimer**

_—The author does not own the cast of SonicTeam, but the author does own their mental maladies._

I milked this _old-saw_ in the twelfth year of my childhood, and with it being my very first spin-off, it had its split ends and plot holes. These hairy bits were "chopped off" in _2009_, but the storyline could not be revised without changing its whole point of existence into something completely different, so I did not cut the "shopworn" _plot_. Writing tone and initial depth has been restyled, but they are marinated in dark themes, so heavy flanderizations of the characters are at work here to execute that ploy. Timeline launches off of _Sonic Adventure 2! _If you find a "sense of insensitivity" in the opening, it's only drawing on the lack of emotion to SA2 that the cast displayed in SH when Shadow "appeared after death" aside from half-assed shock.

_*— Genre: Psychological Thriller | Macabre | Romance_

* * *

**_:: Opening Prologue ::_**

* * *

_"There are some qualities  
Some incorporate things  
That have a double life  
Which thus is made  
A type of twin entity..."_

~ _Edgar Allan Poe_

* * *

A.R.K.

It was all but a subsciously bobbing memory at the surface of her brain, like an empty plastic bottle dropped in a pond.

"...So it's still there..." She glazed over recognizable scenes and mawkish dialogue, only filing through main events with her mental cursor.

―_"Can you both hear me? The ARK is close to the Earth! Please hurry up!"_

"As a child, I looked up to my grandfather because of all the great things he accomplished in his life. He was my hero, and I wanted to be a great scientist like him. But...did he really mean to destroy us?"

"I don't know...but what I do know is, we all did it together!"

"Sonic? What's taking you so long? If you don't get here soon, she WILL die!"

"Just letting Knuckles pilot the ship over here was more dangerous than you could ever be!"

"It's all going according to plan; there's no reason for me to help them..."

"There has to be!"

"...Do you really think...that the professor created Shadow to carry out the revenge on all those who live there, on Earth?"

"What's the matter, Sonic?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Come on! Let's go home! To the planet as cool and blue as me!"-

For a year, _Space Colony Ark_ had just been another star on Orion's belt, and like an _Egyptian coffin_ lost to history, it was a star no one looked at. As she turned an ear away from the old monodies of what was residual, she fell in with the lion's share of watertight citizens; unspeaking, unaffected, and undistorted by the glint of last year's adventure on the Milky Way. Her eyes were for _others_ stars — stars that raced the sun with red sneakers and blue legs. Her mind was for _other _things — things that mooned over romantic dates and wedding bands with a living incarnation of euphoria. Old mindsets and habits that censored out tragic sagas in space to keep up a delusion of rainbows; to bury her double-sworded deed of having saved a planet by reconciling and ending the life a characterless shadow who'd misheard the light.

She never thought of herself as any kind of heroine when she already had a hero to do her saving, you see. And her hero, alas, hadn't been seen in six months, but it didn't stop her from seeing his image. She saw blue in the sky when she looked up; blue in the ocean when she looked down, _{oh, how ironic; he hates the water, but it's bluer than him!}, _blue in the laces of shoes she purchased; blue in the newspapers flashing a cheesy grin; blue on the magazine rocking a thumb's up. She missed him to tears and sighs; she missed him to hallucinations and insanity!

Six months before his disappearance, he would even talk less, stare more, rescue off time, and disappeare all the time. He wasn't impatient anymore; he was _indifferent_. There was a questionable nature of bipolarity — some kind of _bipolar depression_that made him bluer than fur could get, and then perkier than cheeks could smile in another moment. Yet it was still reflex that made her want to cling onto him and crush him into a hug until his ribs cracked when he made his way back to Station Square.

But when she saw him, and he saw her, she had _no_ desire to smother him in lip-glossed kisses and sobbing hugs. His eyes didn't 'wink with a twink', as she had often petnamed their green personality. They were these unsmiling, stale types of jade...well, _things _to look at! And instead of giving her a wave, his lips contorted into this upside down smirk, and he turned to glare at the ocean. She rubbed her ankle with her toe in angst at his change of character and, in self-conscious shame, looked down at her feet.

She talked and he mumbled.

_{...S—Sonic...}_

She walked and he staggered.

_{Sonic...!}_

She hated brushing shoulders with him.

_{SONIC!}_

She hated it when he didn't look at her.

...And she hated wondering if he hated her. Vaguely she knew he was going to pieces in some way. Vaguely she knew he was out of touch. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Forever. _{My God. Not forever. Please not forever...}_

And when they took a train into _Mystic Ruins_to visit Tails on the fifth week of his arrival, she had never heard him murmur, "Pathetic..." in such a foul breath as he watched the city's gray towers warp into the jungle's green trees outside the window.

That recognizable quote was used by only one hedgehog; the one her hero was now morphing into it.

And she hated it.

* * *

"Sonic!"

A blue dash-mark zigzagged between the trees, taking their hair with it.

"_SONIC!"_

A classic game of cat and mouse under more depressing circumstances.

"This is getting a little old, don't you think?" The nasally voice whined, hearing herself echo back to her.

...Old.  
..._Old!_  
Old was _good._  
Old was _habit._  
Old was _normalcy._

She thought about it, chewed it up, and digested it until it left her body shivering with excitement — _with possibility._

Thus, the flavor in these lines had never tasted better: "Darn it! Why does he always have to play so hard to get? Not to mention leaving a poor defenseless girl like me alone in a place like this!" She pretended to pucker her lips like a blowfish and set her hands on her hips for further improvisation.

And then, suddenly — oh! just beyond the trees! — there was a two-second sighting of a blue fugitive on her right!

She blinked, her 18mm eyelashes accentuating the cuteness of it, and cried out in an overdramatic squeal, "_Sonic!_"

The pink hedgehog was chasing zaps and zips of blue through the heart of _Mystic Ruins_ like an elementary schooler tracking an _Easter Bunny_, but it wasn't to hammer him down until he agreed to take her paw in marriage. It was to kick him back into standard routine, the coined juxtaposition of their characters, and dress him in Sonic's skin again...-—and then, _maybe later,_ discuss which restaurant to eat out at. An hour ago, he had sworn on his right paw that all he needed to shake his mood was a few laps around the jungle before they headed to Tails, but Amy wasn't convinced. By now, she was gaining on him, and he didn't even peek over his shoulder. Did he _even hear her?_

"HEY! Slow down, wouldja?! Y'know I can't run as fast as you can!" Amy huffed and puffed, still grinning among the sweat, but all her funning dropped from her face when something wet hit her cheek. Hard, and wet. _'...A teardrop!'_ She touched it. Glints of translucence. _'His teardrop?'' _"S—Sonic...?" Her scared expression switched to the epitome of determination.

That was it — she was going to accomplish this mission and bring "Sonic" back.

"Ready or not, hear I COME!"

A chill fired down his spine and fizzled all the way up to his quills. Amy swung out her Piko Piko Hammer and slammed its massive head against the jungle floor to launch herself into a high jump. The shadow above Sonic began to triple in size, and once it had blocked his sun completely, he looked up to see a laughing, hysterical Amy with her arms and legs spanned out like a flying squirrel. The two tumbled down a mudslide in a fit of squeals and hollers before he could get his breath. He hacked up the muck and its fetid flavor after surfacing from a puddle of sludge with Amy's legs and arms circled around his near-broken back.

She snuggled his head of spikes and claimed her trophy with the usual giggly line, "I got you now, my dar~ling Sonic!"

For some reason, she was hoping this would trigger old customs; the traditional roundabout of banter and bicker, but there was no hopeless groan or lip-quivering suspense in response. He lifted himself emotionlessly—_robotically_—and caused Amy to slip off his back and skin her elbows on a bed of rocks.

After wincing from the sting, she wiped her cheek, flung her head up and attacked him with a scolding, "What's your _problem_?!"

He didn't turn as he cleaned his ear with his pinky, and his body language was stiff; _off._He couldn't even fake acting like himself!

"I _said,_ 'What's your problem?!'" Amy's temper was a front for her fear. "_What?_ My hero forgot how to have a sense of humor? Loosen _up_, Sonic! Have _some fun_!" She splashed some mud on his back laughingly, hoping to lighten both their moods.

The filth sludged down his back in dripping gunk as he stood afield. Amy stopped in mid-throw; hands full of the mud sloshing down her knees.

...Birds catcalled.

Squirrels tutted.

"...I don't..." His limp hand barred into a fist. "I'm not going to be around for a little bit longer, Amy."

Gasp. "...Son..._Sonic_?" Tears.

"I need more time." Guilt.

Amy heaved herself off the ground in a panic that almost made her fly backwards. His legs began to squat as he got into position to run. To run again, run and...leave her here? _No!_

She hurried to him, hands asking for his embrace, eyes watering for his submission, "B-But you HAD time! You've been away from all of us for six months!"

"..._Amy_..." He relaxed his eyes, pausing.

"...Sonic..." Amy whispered in a knowing sense.

"..._Understand_..."

"I _do_understand!" Amy cried for her Sonic and not this one.

"You don't—...You _can't_..._I _don't even—..."

She crept closer to him and touched his shoulders, smiling in 'understanding,' oblivious to the muscles that flexed under her touch.

Done.

"_Understand_!"

His eyes were redder than blood; his face was black with shadows; his teeth looked like fangs to Amy's imagination, but his outcry had something of a sob and a growl to it. It was like he was horrified to be in his own body, and that scared her even more.

"..." Speechless with no rational explanation to fall back on, Amy backed up and tripped on her own sandals.

Her back slammed against the mud and arched a breathless yelp out of her. When she managed to double over and roll onto her side, she cowered up at her hero with brown muck sopping down her mortified face. But that monster, that blue demon was gone, and there stood a traumatized blue hedgehog.

"..." He looked at his palms, shaking and almost to the point of tears.

The Sonic in front of her wasn't breathing right. Looking past his madness, there wasn't any aminosity shearing off him; there was regret, pain and horror. He stumbled up to shower her in repetitive apologies, but she smacked his hands away.

"Don't TOUCH me!" Amy shook her head, eyes squeezed shut with tears down her cheeks. "What's wrong with you, _Sonic_? Why have you been acting like...-Why won't you let anyone in?"

"...Amy..." The unrecognizable hedgehog gulped hard, "...it's because I need you," his pointing finger shook into a gesturing palm for her to back away from him, "...I need everyone, to _stay away_ from me for the time being. That's all I'm _asking _for."

"You were alone! You've _been_ alone! So now that you're here, you should've known that I was going to do my best to try and bring you back! I spent all my time kissing the ground the Sonic _I _knew once w―walked on—"

"_Exactly_, Amy!" His pitch went higher in a sing-song chirp as his head perked up with the shrugging out of his arms in the most sarcastic mockery. "...You've spent your time sugar-coating me with all this "one-hero glory" stuff after the one ally who no one even had a memorial for died on our watch! You've been acting like you've had amnesia over the facts of what went down a year ago...over _who_ saved _what_...—as if you don't even care, as if it never happened, as if the entire world just woke up one day and forgot, like you've all been spitting on it on purpose! I've practically _inherited_ his suffering..." He turned away and grabbed at his head, shaking it and sobbing angrily with a tone torn between a beast and a peasant, "_I_...couldn't _save_someone...for the first time in my life, I vomit up my shame in bathroom sinks after every press "interview." Is it in your power to stop and think about how sick that kind of thing is?" His laugh was dry, his eyes' yoke were prickling with unshed tears, his pupils weren't focusing, and he was salivating.

"..." Amy crept closer with all the longing she could muster in her eyes as she dragged her feet onward. "Son—"

"_Stop,_" He snapped his head up. "The color BLUE is holding you BACK. Go to _school_, Amy...! _Live_! Get a career, make your own happiness, chase a _life_, fall in love with _yourself_," His throat grew sore and tight as the ferocity in his face softened into grief, "...because Sonie can not be your life goal after you find out he's not...as squeaky-clean and righteously heroic as all you think h-he's made up to be..."

Amy's face was frozen in a wet-eyed frown, but her pupils just seemed to shrink after every word he tongue-lashed at her. With the last words of slow burn, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Sun of Station Square, sprinted out of sight. Amy sat there on her knees, stricken with 'how?'s and 'why?'s. A tear squiggled down her cheek. It lingered on her chin, before bouncing off her bracelet in a soft 'ping' once it leaked.

He had never shown such symptoms of bipolarity before. No, no, Sonic would kept his cool in death! He would smile in darkness, run endlessly over the globe, grin in the face of pain. The abandonment and betrayal that Amy had worn for five seconds soon melted into fury.

She squeezed the muck in her fingers and jumped to her feet, "FINE!" She cried to him as he wandered far out. "Y...you...OOOH...y-you...!"

No comment back.

She cringed back in shock and tears but then became a volcanic hurricane all at once. "G'head, then! Run away from your problems, because running is what you love best!" She kicked up some mud after him and broke down the opposite road.

* * *

Lost.

She had been lost for a good few forevers without even realizing that nightfall had dawned on the jungle hours ago.

_"Run away!"_

Hearing her own voice was giving her a migraine.

"...That was wrong of me," Dragging her feet, Amy slowed to a stop in front of a lake. "I should've went back after him, no matter what he said. I should've _helped_...I should've tried harder to listen to him, to understand what he's transforming _into_..." she bit her tears back. "Oh, Sonic..."

She collapsed onto her skinned knees and continued to stare at the water's ripples. Amy dipped a finger in the lake and swirled it in the moon's reflection. With a whining gasp, she blinked up at the night sky.

...For a year, Space Colony Ark has just been another star on Orion's belt.

"...So it's still there, huh?" She could feel the tears building up, seething out, pouring down...

Amy hid her shame in her hands. "Sonic…" She sobbed and hiccupped; ears flattening against her head. "Just how could this day get any worse…?!" A roar of thunder caused Amy's left ear to spring up. As if she had chanted the spell in elfin, down came the rain. Amy blinked in disbelief as gallons of it soaked her down. With a growl, she flailed her fists before inhaling a breath to holler, "…Why is this happening?!"

Lightning flashed under the whirlpooling clouds above her. She spent another hour marching in the slush and slappng tears off of her cheeks, and then spent another in search of an exit in hopes of finding Tails' Workshop.

_'And I have to get back to Sonic! I can't leave him like this!' _Lightning electrocuted a tree beside her and torched its leaves into embers of fire and smoke. In tears again, the pink girl leapt out of the way of a flaming branch that had snapped off.

"Why is this happening…?" Amy's jogs broke into a run; the owls' hoots around her bestialized into demonic laughter. "…Why is this happening?!"

There was nothing to see; everything was black; eyes and fangs in trees and bushes with air the color of blood; clouds above swirling like tornados. In spite of everything, she kept on running to escape the nightmare she had created in her head, she kept on falling and crawling in the mud, she kept on running for a life that was never in danger. Once she'd squeezed her eyes shut and started wailing, her toe tripped over a vine on the road. Her sob caught in her throat and gurgled out in a choke as things went in slow motion from there - her body being yanked forward, her head snapped back, her arms in the air, her eyes pinprick dots of green, the world turning upside-down. Then it sped up, just as she skidded face first into the puddles. She slammed her palms down on the ground and pulled her face out of the dome of hard mud. Shaking, sobbing and slobbering, Amy retched up the brown sludge she'd inhaled.

"S—Stupid rain…" Amy almost scratched her eyes out to get the muck out of them.

But just when she was smudging tears across her muzzle with the heels of her hands—she stopped. The wind blew her hair sideways, making pink strands straddle across her wide eyes. There was a gap of missing earth in front of her; a meteor-crash. Amy crawled to it on her belly and peeked into the hole's mouth. She squinted; her vision was weak in the rain that fell harder than chunks of hail, but once her concentration had concentrated, her pupil sucked back into her iris.

Lightning lit the dark.

There, lying in cakes of mud, was a ball of black fur striped in splints of red. Slabs of mud, urine, and rain slimed its face as the storm roared overhead.

The lightning flickered out and the vision was lost in the dark again.

...Amy covered her mouth and wheezed out a shuddery breath; she didn't need to think about it, or ask if she was imagining it. Instead, she denied it, "I—It's not him...it's not HIM..!"

Like a reactionary spasm to her lies, her stomach folded and throbbed. The voice in her head was telling her she was nothing but a fool in pink.

The hedge of ebony quills, streaked in vermillion, and the white, rusted air-blades layered in dirt and animal feces, belonged to no one else. Even if it was him, she didn't want to see his dead body, or remember how she pressed her fingertips against the glass of the space shuttle to brood about his death for less than twenty minutes.

"Get a hold of yourself, Amy…" She stood up dazedly and gulped as she wrinkled the hem of her shorts. She tried to close her eyes, regain her sanity, and about-face, but karma wasn't having it.

Her clumsy footing made her slip and slide down the hole's muddy walls. She tumbled in front of the body, hugging her shivering body as rain beat down on her shoulders, drowning her in her cheese-thin clothing until it looked as transparent as soaked plastic, all enough to see the goosebumps pimpling her breasts. She had no choice but to lift her mud-caked face and see the truth lying a foot away from her behind all the tears. Roots, vines, destroyed flowers and even moss had grown on his body, shackling his wrists and ankles, greening his back and spikes, making him a part of the Earth.

"I—It is him..." She knew it long ago, but it made her feel less woozy to say it aloud.

The unnerved pink hedgehog edged near the anicent corpse. She whimpered and longed out her hands to touch him to see if he was alive, but she was too afraid to find out.

Animals that looked dead were known to jolt to life with shock value in mind, but this wasn't a suspenseful horror movie on _Lifetime_.

"Sh—Shadow...?" Amy stressed on the syllables of his name, trying to will him awake by her plea without having to web her fingers through his fur and check for a pulse. "Oh God, y—you're..."

She had forgotten about Shadow the Hedgehog over the one year period. Tails, Knuckles, Rouge, and even Eggman never mentioned Ark, Professor Gerald or Shadow the Hedgehog. It was like it never happened. It appeared to her now that Sonic was the one who dwelled on it the longest.

Sonic was the one who turned away when G.U.N. thanked him for saving their world and ridding them of the Professor's "weapons" like "Project Shadow." Even those who thanked him without spitting on Shadow's name never mentioned the black hedgehog's fallen alliance. He looked at her digustedly with his lip curled back around his teeth when she worshipped him for being everyone's hero, but she never worshipped Shadow. Never spoke of him. Never cared to think of him even though she was the reason of his death.

Amy Rose's now quaking fingers squirmed out to Shadow the Hedgehog, but they cringed back into her palms as a tear dripped off her top lip with the rain.

Had Sonic been the one hurting, and the one resenting her because she was a representation of all who praised him while ignoring Shadow's death?

Her dripping bangs dangled over her face.

...Was she truly this one-dimensional?

Amy stared at the black creature's face, inhaling it all in, trying to imagine Sonic's pain, trying to feel it and make it her own, but she could only think one selfish thing: _'...You're the reason Sonic hates me.'_

The glare that had always been there -the cleft in his eyebrows with the red highlights in the arches of his lids — was stuck on Shadow's face, even in his death. They always say if you frown too much, your eyebrows get stuck together. Did that household myth prevent him from smiling?

_'Shadow...S—Sonic...' _Amy hiccupped a little on a sob as she rested her hands on Shadow's furry back.

Red eyes flunked open.

Amy gasped and scrambled back on her hands, jaw dropping open. She was going to die. She was sure of it. Sure of it the moment she saw his eyes fly across the jungle and catch hers.

The Lord of Hades rose up like a shadow that'd materialized from the very Earth as his horned quills mirrored a crown for all his damnation.

Rain rolled off Amy's eyelashes as they flickered feverishly in overwhelm. His shadow towered over her with the forked, demonic pair of ram-like quillls blocking her view of the clouds above his head. Shadow's eyes darkened into a bloodcurdling glare, and his fangs became glinting sabers in their grit.

Amy wept his name, inhaling rain, "...Sha...dow..."

Suddenly, Shadow crumbled to his knees. He steadied up on his elbows just to keel over in pain in the end. His grimace never stayed off hers as strings of saliva drooled from his chin. Amy, for the third time, gulped down her fear and leaned in little by little, but he jerked back and tensed himself into a defensive stance. Right then and there, Amy did not see him as a murderous somebody, but a frightened anybody.

"Who..._are_ you?" The hedgehog's shadowy voice rasped, but gaspingly too. His eyelids were twitching-fighting to stay open. "_What_ do you _want?_ ...**SPEAK.**"

The only thing Amy could mouth was the hoarse, "I—It's..._me_...d...d—don't you remember?"

Without another warning, he winced; arm snaked around his chest and curled fingers clinging to the white star of fur. Amy moved her attention away from his face and brought it down to the glove that was now blackened in blood.

"Shadow, you're bleeding!"—And from the heart.

Amy watched him collapse, shriveled up and hysterical. His body began convulsing from head to toe until he froze into unconsciousness and hypothermia again. Amy's fist hovered by her mouth in panic of what to do.

Oh God, what COULD she do?

She touched his soaked back with the scared tremors in her fingers. No temperature. He didn't feel like anything but bristly hair that hadn't been groomed in a millennia. Amy stroked through the knotted mats of fur and moss to feel scabs and crusted old blood.

There was only one thing left to do.

Amy nodded to herself and balled her hand into an encouraging fist. She had to do it, because she'd never leave a soul out here to die.

With her tank top and shorts drowned to the small hips and flat stomach of her dripping-wet body, Amy hiked up the slope's walls to find shelter nearby in knee-deep mud. She spotted a cabin a little further up the road. The cabin's roof was hidden under beds of vines, mounds of dirt and broken tree branches, but she still prayed to whatever God up there someone would offer them a night to stay. In minutes, Amy was climbing out of the large meteorite crash site with Shadow's limp body dangled over her back. She failed many times before with the result of Shadow toppling back into the concave bottom like a puppet without strings, and had to use a vine to tie them together.

"Oi, Shadow," Amy puffed as she tried the effort again. "You're heavier than you look..." _'Has he really been out here for a year? That long?' _Her thoughts spoke in worries.

All atmospheric electricity contracted to one area in the middle of the thunderstorm as Amy reached high ground. The earth was showered with purple lightning bolts that rampaged in tantrums, almost hitting Amy and Shadow. She dove into a puddle and scrambled under a large leaf big enough to be mistaken for a green kanoe. She clinched the sides of it and pulled it over her and Shadow's head uptill the lightning shower was over. When she reached the cabin's porch, she remembered her manners and knocked first. The door was worn and less than sturdy, but she didn't want to be rude. Amy looked around the jungle to occupy herself. Still waiting, she wiped her stuffy nose and heaved Shadow's body a bit higher up onto her back to keep him from sliding off.

Nobody answered.

"Hello?" Amy knocked again.

Not even a creak on the wood inside the cabin to say that someone was coming to the door. The devil-born eyes watching her from the jungle terrain numbed her will to keep herself under control, and the growls grumbling from the bush beside her caused her to snap.

"Is anyone H—HOME?!" Amy coughed and sneezed, sobbed and slobbered. She shivered from Shadow's hot breath smothered into her neck and the cold weather raising hairs on her skin. "I need h—help! Oh, please!_Please_help me!"

Her knees sagged into squats; Shadow was getting heavier. She could feel the blood from his chest bleeding itself into her own fur.

"Anybody, please!" Amy knocked harder and flattened herself against the door to emphasize her desperation as she sobbed harder, "S—Shadow needs _help_! He'll...he'll die! Please, HELP me!"

No one was coming for her, or 'Shadow.'

"...Arrrrgh, is ANYBODY — _HOME_?!" She banged and banged on the door with her fist, and then used her foot to kick at it to exercise her temper.

The door itself flew wide open at the demand of her sandal and granted her access. She stood in the doorway blinking in dumbfound, before remembering Shadow's condition. Amy hand-swept the debris and leaves off an old blanket that had already been laid out on the mold-guttered floor and rested Shadow down on it with extra caution as though he'd break. She massaged her thumbs into his shoulders all the way down to his forearms to knead in some warmth, and then sat up on her knees, sniffing up her cold. The cabin had one room and one room only, with two windows, an independent mat to brew a fireplace, a few shelves of empty or broken jars, and a badly-patched roof that leaked nearly as much as it rained outside. It was indisputable that no one had lived here by the roaches and mice hiding behind the crushed cans wedged in the back of the shelf. She'd have to adapt.

Amy kept tabs on the thunderstorm outside and the black hedgehog, whose now curly-furred body, was forming a rumpled spot in the blanket from the rainwater drenched on him.

"…If I don't hurry to keep him warm and healed…he could probably get blood poisoning! But that storm is suicide…!"

Although she had no knowledge of whether an artificial entity was immune or prone to infection, she wasn't going to risk her lack of it. Amy bit the tips of her gloved fingers and watched Shadow breathe out fogs of white through his nostrils along with a forced exhale that appeared to hurt him.

He looked as helpless as she did everyday...

"But Shadow might die if I don't do something now!" She might've known he was immortal, but instinct conquered memory.

The storm orchestrated louder as the winds howled and the rain roared the moment she closed the door behind her. She had to strain to walk through the air current's gravity. It would change directions here and then, blow her right, then blow her left, and sometimes make her spin in a dance with a twisting mini-tornado. The pink hedgehog could find no wood in the storm or the godforsaken cabin, so she'd just have to chop her own. She smashed the stomach of trees with her Piko Piko Hammer and carried as much as she could back to the shelter. When she got back, Shadow was still out cold, and in a critical state. His white patch was now entirely red.

If he'd been out there for a year, then where'd this wound come from? Was it an old wound that had opened up?

Amy dumped the wood on the wooden floor and clambered over to Shadow to rest a hand on his frowning forehead, almost trembling that she had even touched him. His body had temperature now, but it was at a freezing temperature, like metal left out in the snow.

"I have to get this campfire going, but before that..." Amy stripped off the bottom of her tank top, balled it up, and rinsed it in a bucket that had filled up with water from the rain dripping through the roof.

After she'd lapped up the blood on his chest feathers, she rubbed an herbal tea leaf into the crux of the wound she found out in the jungle that Big the Cat had taught her to identify from Poison Ivy. Once this was tended to, she grabbed the nearest rock, dumped herself on her rear and curled her tongue to the side of her mouth as she burned the rock's friction against wood to recreate what cavemen did. Of course, since the wood was sodden and drying it with her clothes did little to no good, it was hard to burn anything. Although, it wasn't impossible. Not after an hour of in between nurturing Shadow, anyway. At the final try, she alighted the wood into a hiss of fire on the already arranged fireplace, and grinned. She dragged Shadow next to the fire by the armpits, and found unused muscles she never knew she had.

All was finished, and this was all she could do. Amy folded her legs into their tucks and watched Shadow from behind the fire. Shadow's eyelids, muzzle, forehead, and lips — the beige appendages quirked up in an arrow-like smirk — glowed with the firelight. He didn't look scary or unpredictable. He looked — and Amy's eyes gentled with this — safe.

All was quiet and intense, except the natural exceptions.

Drops of water on the bucket's pail. Wind threatening to destroy the roof overhead. Rain tackling the door. Mice squeaking and roaches crawling up the windows.

Amy crushed her legs against her chest and plopped her chin on her knees. The embers of the fire filled her eyes, manifesting them into burning emeralds. The burning emeralds watered, and she dropped her face in her knees, her shoulders soon trembling with her smile.

...What now?

* * *

**# Author's Note**

* * *

_—* The excuse disguised as a point for Sonic's flanderization, is that old blue has been slowly malforming into "Shadow." The cause? Losing a potential friend whom he could not save for once and being exposed to the idea of death. It doesn't make sense, for me, for Sonic's shiny world to not be affected by such a jolt of reality-and for this I just pushed it into mild psychopathy. He's not seeking sustenance from his companions; he's disconnected_ and_ wants to be away. On the contrary, he's going through what Shadow went through when he lost Maria, since it was implied for Shadow to have been "perfect and pure" before his own calamity struck. Sonic, on the other hand, is torn between sanity and insanity altogether in here, so that's the route I took. Partially like the route that was taken for Fleetway Sonic when he lost his bunny comrade. We always see Sonic so well put together with his feelings, even in the worst circumstances, so I wanted to stash him some severe trauma at the loss of Shadow. _

_**—* Critiques:** This is an old story, so I don't want/need them. I know where it falls, and I know how I've improved since this time._

_ I was one of those earlier willows when this shipping first came around the ben, so it's obviously not too fresh when it comes to scenario. I was probably one of the first to invent that stupid "Amy gets lost in the jungle/finds Shadow's body" plot. After that several just seemed to mimic it. But enjoy. _


	2. The Damsel in Distress

_Lub…dub._

**[[[Bubbling fluid inside a test tube]]]**

_…Lub―dub._

_"Do what you dreamed, Shadow… (Shadow…)"_

_…Lub―dub._

**[[[Fingers drawing hearts on the glass's fog]]]**

_"Do it for me…"_

**[[[Surgery table; wires; cords; plugs; life support machine; blood-rusted scissors; testicles and liver slimed on the tray]]]**

_"For all the people (people…)…of that planet… (planet)"_

Lub―dub.

Lub―dub.

**[[[Blinding high-beams from overhead; shadowy faces; eye-censoring glasses; white coats; voices; syringe-nosed robots]]]**

_- "(Do what you dreamed…dreamed…) Shadow… (Please Shadow…Shadow…) give them a chance… (do it for me…)"_

Lub―dub, Lub―dub, Lub―dub.

"-(For all the people…) Sayonara… (…of that planet) Shadow... (give them a chance…) the hedgehog… (to be…)"

**[[[Vaccine injections; multiplying cells; spiraling DNA bridge; thongs clenching a heart dripping in blood; beeping life support machine; heartbeat; GAAASP―――**

Black eyelids flew open, and the collapsed lungs of the artificial experimentdilated as a flood of oxygen was sucked in. Vision was foggy and off-angle; could hardly discern the wooden arches of the mold-caked ceiling and blood-eyed rats hissing in the corners. Groans and grunts are heard somewhere and everywhere as they echo far and between. It isn't until the ringing is depleted that Shadow the Hedgehog realizes they're his.

...They're his.

He stiffened where he lied and stopped himself from breathing.

They're _his._

Shadow lifted his palm-shredded gloves in front of his face. He wiggled the blurry white phalanges with that yellow, warm light from some unknown source bleeding in between their margins.

"…What the _hell's_going on?" He panicked.

Hobbling up on his elbows, he lifts his chin out and blinks unevenly; trying to gather as much information about his whereabouts as his eyesight can gather in the strain of coming blindness.

_**"Shadow, give them a chance, to be happy..."**_

His eyelids snap back. The blurs in his optics defog themselves. _'Maria…?'_

It's in his head. He could hear it pulsing like a cell-mutation on the temporal lobe of his brain. The voice tuned from Maria to a high shriek that made his ears fold back in a wince,

_**"Shadow (Shadow!)! **I beg of you―"_

The, _"…I beg of you,"_suddenly sounded like it was coming from the right of him, as if a ghost had flung itself across the room. His eyes wildly followed the voice's location, and there to the right of him was a tiny pink hedgehog curled up on the floor with a roach sitting on her finger.

Shadow smeared the dirty sweat off his cheek with the back of his finger and mumbled under his breath, "…You…..."―was how he identified her.

**_"They're basically good if they never give up on their wishes! They always have a reason to be happy! That's why you should help them out!"_**

"So then I am not amnesic..." Shadow massaged the side of his head to numb the headache that was making him grind his fangs. After he peeled an eye open, he looked to the window that was bursting with sunlight. "Earth; third planet from the Sun, Maria's corrupted wonderland. This is where I've impacted..." he flexes his fingers again. "…Alive." _'But for how long...? How long has it been...?'_

As if on cue, the images flashed back into his mind:

**[―/―]**

_"Who...are you?" The hedgehog's shadowy voice rasped, but gaspingly too. His eyelids were twitching―fighting to stay open. "What do you want? ...SPEAK."_

_The only thing Amy could mouth was the hoarse, "I―It's...me…d...d―don't you remember?"_

**[―/―]**

He rubbed his temples with his mid-fingers, "..You, once more." _'And once more, it seems I am indebted to her.' _Yet he didn't laugh about it; he wasn't in a position to be signing an 'I-owe-you.'

Shadow's ear propped up and flailed at the sound of shrouding spray. His nose twiddled―air smelt like musk; rain. He lowered his hands from his head and squinted at the window once again. The sun had been sucked back into the clouds, and the downpour was thrumming hard on the glass. As the sky thundered and the wind blustered, the storm seemed to be throwing a bad-to-worse tantrum. Shadow's gloved claws scraped the surface of the wooden floor as his fingers locked into a fist.

Amy sneezed in sync with the thunderstorm's booms and cannonades. The rain's shadows danced on her body as she snuggled deeper into herself. Shadow watched her through the side of his eye before staring back ahead of him.

He grounded his teeth together until they ached. He couldn't run out and battle the storm like any other enemy, and―as much as he lied to himself that he had the willpower to―could not leave the pink hedgehog defenseless. Because of her past deed and her stance as a mere child, she earned the privilege, as there was also the―

_"I have to keep my promise to Maria...and you."_

_―_that chained him now.

His devotion was riding on a family promise he allowed her to inherit, and proposing anyone any kind of oath were not without motivation from his own emotional sentiments for them. In defense against what most perceived, Shadow the Hedgehog's past also forced him to carry a sin-repenting code of his own, and his pacts were as solid as the glares on his face. He was fair in regards to "returning homage" by the service of equivalent exchange, and it would be contradictory of him to be the reason of any small child's death after what happened to his sister, let alone one he'd passed Maria's heirloom onto. He couldn't have that on his conscience, he couldn't become the manifestation of what he was once so hatefully against; his mind had now been cleansed after his revelation on ARK with the pink hedgehog.

...His twelve year old Maria had taught him better than that, and the twelve year old hedgehog he'd sworn oath to a Space Colony ago gave him further insight as well. Though on the contrary, there was no trace of―he checked himself, then gnarred―his Chaos Emerald!

* * *

Amy blinked her eyes awake and rubbed them pink with the back of her wrist. She paused in the middle of her yawning at the sight of a black hedgehog lying right beside her. He was on his back with his hands folded on top of his chest. She was a breath away from crying out in horror, but was able to catch herself when the flashbacks of a particular Lifeform's unconscious body being drowned in rain hit her at full force.

"…Shadow…?" Amy hoarsened. It was too much strain to bring her voice any higher, or any _braver_for that matter.

His black ear turned in her direction, and those eyes of his, the ones that made her cower when they didn't blink, flitted open.

"….Do you feel alright, Shadow?" She hovered over his face.

Shadow's monotone face didn't change as he rolled onto his side to sit up.

"I'm fine," He spoke like a shadow; low-keyed, husky, nearly inaudible. He sounded vulnerable, too.

_'...Huh? Vulnerable?'_

Well, with or without that questionable vulnerability, it was a voice she wasn't used to. Sonic's voice was exaggerative and wacky, easy to socialize with and always a refreshing invitation to add your own cheery voice in, but Shadow's...its smooth, baritone accent was deep enough to vibrate the molecules in the ozone, and always a stale disinvitation to chip your intimidated glance at.

Even with the obvious hint that he was ignoring her right now, Amy smiled, despite how tight and dry she was in the mouth.

"Well that's a relief," Amy held her chest and sighed, "I thought you were gonna die for sure at first…"

Shadow's tall ears straightened at the comment.

To a fascinated Amy who cocked her head, she noticed his ears were longer and more forked than hers upon the way they stood on his head with the undivided attention his eyes wouldn't give her. The temptation to pet one of those ears and forget they belonged to a moody hog-oid made her bop herself on the head.

"An artificial lifeform is immortal," Shadow's decision to speak made Amy jump. "Therefore, it is immune to an organic being's downfalls such as pnemonia and hypothermia."

"You sure about that...?" Amy was embarrassed by how shy and quiet she sounded, but talking to him was such a bizarre exchange of conversation. Their voices, they...they just weren't in _tune._"You were hyperventilating on and off..."

His ears rounded to her again, but this time his eyes followed suit. She didn't breathe in the same way he didn't blink, and the suspense was killing her.

"...How long has it been?" Shadow broke it.

His voice rasped like something was scratching at the walls of his throat. Its tone was weak and craggy, dying even, maybe due to the evidence that he hadn't spoken for a year.

"...Eh?" Amy itched her cheek. "How long what? How long have we been trapped in a drippy cabin, or how long were you hyperventilating?"

"How long has it _been_, since the officiality of my 'death'?" Shadow asked louder, better functioned in speaking when his humiliation of his weakened stance stirred into self-conscious anger.

"Oh..." Amy watched her ankles knock.

Shadow waited.

Amy cleared her throat.

...Shadow's fingers twitched.

Amy yawned out a tear that she wiped after patting her mouth, "...Ahhh, it's been a whole year since..." she faked a few arm stretches to buy time for thinking up a better phrase than 'your death', "...the~ battle with Biolizard on Space Colony Ark."

The raze of light in his eye distraught her, but it was difficult to tell whether it were soft, hard, violent or contemplating. Either way, his stare took effect.

The silence stepped in again when Amy didn't ask for it. She wasn't fond of long breaks and pauses in between conversations, or the intensifying, possibly confused-stuck-between-infuriated stare she was getting from Shadow. Anti-socialism from the second party never discouraged Amy Rose, of all chatter-boxes, to pause in the middle or end of a chat. Though, as quiet as Shadow was, his air hung like a heavy weight of bricks on top of natural gravity, and it silenced her into intimidation. She wasn't _scared_ of him; never this. She was _awkward_with him, and couldn't understand why. She wasn't the kind of person to be shut up so easily, and though Shadow's corrosive energy was overwhelming, he should be no exception. Perhaps the change in wind in her relationship with Sonic and his relationship with the rest of their friends, had stringed a glitch in her as well.

Amy fisted her hands in her lap and leaned back when she realized the dark hedgehog had not stripped his gaze from her.

"S...Stop looking at me like that. It's...it's _rude_to stare, you know!" On an Amy-basis, she'd say that with an attitude, but this time, her own throat was trembling and had failed to sound 'tough' like a power-puff girl.

The trademark cleft in Shadow's brow scrunched in more, making the frown more of an insulted scowl. He closed his eyes, slewed his head away, and stood up. Amy, however, couldn't quite cotton on why he was walking away from her, but because of their awkward connection, held back from shooting off on him. One cough after another expectorated out of Shadow all of the sudden until he was forced to hold his fist to his mouth and hunch over.

"Shadow?" Amy sat on her knees, torn between sitting and walking to his aid. "Are you...okay?"

Once she got the courage to take part in the latter with her hand diving in for his shoulder, Shadow spun away from Amy and used the cabin's wall for support instead of her. The hacking and spitting of bloody mucus didn't stop for a while, and Amy clutched her stomach's vomit back with each smat that hit the floor. The vomit was not congesting from the image of his bodily slime, but from the image of him in agony. The hemming and hawing slowed, but he was still harrumphing every here and then, putting her caring sensitivity on edge. She said not a word, and waited for him to confirm convalesce.

"...You carried me in this weather?" Shadow's back kept to her as he recovered; only the thunderstorm destroying the jungle behind the window had the priviledge of seeing his expression now.

Amy tilted her head at the way he said it; the styled quills swaying to one side in a cuteness he clearly missed, "Of course I did. How else could I have dragged you all the way here?"

Shadow the Hedgehog glanced back at her from his black shoulder, and Amy was on tip-toe as she held the bottom of her shorts, hoping he'd say something so she could talk more and encourage her to be herself again. Sonic's dent had stubbed a dent in her as well. Shadow's eye seemed to consider her and perhaps respect the attention she craved, but then just like that, he veered his head back around to the window.

...Amy's shoulders and ears sunk.

Shadow was miles away from her. Their worlds didn't touch, and their connection was blank. It was neither friendly, hateful, or even 'other.' Amy was the type who made roots, relationships and connections with anyone whether one-sided or hate/love, and though she had a root she shared with Shadow, they did not twine together, and it made her feel awkward, insecure, and mildly unsure of him. The dilemmas in their current state of affairs is what made this so, for she had been sure of the almost _"old, lost friends"_ sentimentality he insinuated to her on Ark.

"Hmph..." Shadow's back didn't turn, but she could make out how his arms posed in their superior cross when they snaked back in front of himself.

Amy bumped her back on the wall to lean against it and stare at her muddy toes. She didn't want to be anywhere near him anymore. She didn't want to keep trying. She didn't want to be sad anymore. She just wanted to go home.

"Shadow...?" One last attempt.

Shadow didn't turn his head.

She could smell him from the short distance between; her nose had taken an unconscious whiff when she leaned her head back on the wall. The wet bark, the pine cones, the grass, the soil, the moss, the flower pollen, the animal feces, his musky body heat, all singed into his fur that was somehow still as slick as a raven's feathers, made him smell like everything good and bad.

Amy's fingers curled into small fists on the wall, "...Why don't you talk?"

Shadow straightened that black back of his with his scalp of kicked-up quills still facing her, but again, did not turn.

...Amy sagged down the wall until her backside hit the floor. "...Please talk back..." She whispered whimperingly, on the slip of losing her mind.

"..."

She squeezed her arms around her legs and nestled her face down into their bloody knees. "Please don't be Sonic...anything but him..." Amy squinted out tears with her forehead buried against her shin. Her body began shaking uncontrollably, her eyes zoned out - she was losing control. She smiled through spills of milk-warm tears like a psychopathic maniac―she was losing control. "Please d-don't shut me out..."―and suddenly, it was Sonic standing before her, the blue dream and the blue demon, with his back and his emotionlessness dejecting her and the rest of the world.

And still, he did not speak. He would not. He could not. All this silence, because he did not speak.

"...W―Why...?" Amy dragged her feet across the floor in the slugging of a zombie; her hands lifting and willing out to him, her fingers shaking to touch him and _warm_ him and _love_ him and _want _him, and...

'Sonic's' head moved by the slightest inch.

That's when Amy did what she knew best―she jumped on him, arms desperately locked around his waist, and smothered her face in his 'blue' fur. His warm skin under the sleek coat basked her face in heat that made her head lazy and sluggish. 'Sonic's' back muscles locked in tight until his body felt rock-hard against her cushiony one.

"Why won't you let me in?" Her fingers nailed into his skin and smashed her cheek into his back, her sobs then wailing harder. " Wh―Why are you shutting me out? What's _wrong _with you? I just want to help, I just want to be here for you―"

A hand snatched her wrist, and squeezed **hard**.

"..." Amy lifted her damp cheek off his back and raised her head to peek past his two spiky spines.

'Sonic' did not shrug her off, shove her off, or fling her off. He moved his eye over his shoulder to look down at her, and the frown gradually began riding back in confusion and disturbance, with an eye that was blazing like a bonfire. That same eye wasn't green, it was―...

Her gasp disgraced her the way the extremity of her actions had. She sobbed and whined out in disbelief as she backed away from the black hedgehog. The tears were on a rampage down her terrified face as she gaped at him from the other side of the room. Shadow the Hedgehog continued staring at her over that shoulder, completely unreadable and non-verbal, as he ate her away with his stare.

It was impossible to know what was going on in his mind. It was impossible to know if he was glaring, staring, or _caring_...

Because he never made a sound. Not one.

Amy backed into the dark corner until the shadows eclipsed her, once again sagging down the wall. She suffocated her arms around her head to shield herself from her humiliation and tucked down into the corner, rocking to and fro on her heels. There was a sigh that made Shadow's ear angle all the way around to her, and a sob that made both ears draw to the top of his head. Yet, his expression never changed, nor blinked.

"...It's all your fault...!" _'That I'm like this, and that Sonic's like this...!'_ "...It's all your f-fault..." There was a growing wetness in her words that proved she wasn't addressing the black hedgehog at all. "Please...please say _something_..." Her nose streaming with mucus, Amy slobbered over her tears and sobbed open-mouth wails, convulsing where she sat until she was coughing on her hiccups.

...Still, he did not speak. He only watched, because, in all this time of his staring, _'...What **could** I have said?' _

Amy Rose cried herself to sleep that night. Shaking, sniffling, and feverish cheeks now soaked in tears, she slipped into dreams of rainbows and blue birds. A demon-eyed rat slithered across her leg while she slept in clueless bliss. Right before it nipped at her fingertip, Shadow's metallic shoe crushed the critter with a sick ― _**crack** ― _to its skull, uncaring for the blood that exploded under his foot. Sliding the dead body away from Amy with his foot still embedded into its intestines, Shadow dropped a raggedy blanket on the pink hedgehog's shoulders. His height hovered over her form in resemblance to the Grim Reaper standing over one's bedside. With his red eyes as his glowing scythe, he narrowed them in the darkness before edging away from the girl and befriending the window once more.

* * *

Hard pats tatted on the window. Sonic the Hedgehog stared out of its fogged glass while his foot tapped on the floorboards at a maddening speed.

"Sonic?" Tails asked concernedly, mostly concerned for his wooden floors; they were delicate, you know. "Are you feeling okay?" he waved his hand in front of Sonic's face. "Hellooooo?"

Sonic turned away, snorting like a pig and shutting his eyes angrily.

The twin-tailed fox jolted up with his hands balled as he announced with a choky shout, "Sonic! If you're going to be this socially isolated like you've been for the past few weeks, then why'd you even stop b-by?" Tails sniffled angrily, trying to control his tearducts.

Sonic moved his eyes to Tails as the lightning flashed. Tails's frown weakened into a tear-squeezing sadness.

"To get out of the rain," is what Sonic's cold stare was finalizing. Sonic drew himself back to the outside world, where the rain squiggled down the glass.

Wiping his eyes, Tails confessed his misery: "...I want Sonic back."

Sonic's ear caught it and Tails saw it, even if it was just a twitch.

Thunder flicked out the lights. The blue hedgehog's fur had now gone all black, but the lamplight swinging outside touched the planes of his quills with a dull orange - no, red light as the dark aura radiated off Sonic's hunched shoulders and rounded back. Sonic had become that other hedgehog - the black and red gargoyle who wore only one line of emotion on his face, the one who saw his best friend die in front of him, the one who held despair on his shoulders like a mantel.

Tails shook his head slowly. Just as he was about to sob out, the lights flickered back on. The blue was back and the black had gone.

...For the time being.

Sonic pressed his cheek against the window's ledge, "…I'm concerned about Amy, that's all."

'"_That's all?_"' Tails's conscience mocked. His eyes were tingling again. '"_That's all_?"'

No, _"Sorry, pal,"_ just a hot-headed, whispery, _"...that's all."_

Sonic's speech had changed with his attitude, though the transformation wasn't exactly complete - or at least, that's what Tails had clapped his hands together and hoped in his prayers at his bedside every night.

"Did...something _happen_to Amy?" Tails fought the fight to steady his voice.

"No, something happened to _me_," Sonic answered hatefully with his best grunt, lifting his cheek from the window sill. "Whatever's in me..." he squinted. "...needs to get out. I was the person watching myself in action but couldn't yell out, _'Hey, stop! What do you think you're doing?'_when Amy confronted me. It was all weird and...and so out of whack." He traced out random objects in the window's fog; the coldness on the glass burned his fingertip. "And you know Amy...she holds onto stuff...and she's probably so upset that she couldn't get through to me, she's stranded out there in this stupid hurricane-typhoon-windwhirl."

Some humor was injected into Sonic's voice with the grouse, _"stupid hurricane-typhoon-windwhirl"_, and it made Tails smile sadly with shining eyes.

"Sonic..." Tails walked up behind him. "You know you can't go after her now, right?" He pointed to the hurtling weather to illustrate, "Just look at those clouds! Plus, those lightning bolts could strike you at any given moment! Do you know how many people die per year by lightning strikes?"

"Thanks for the _endorsement_, Tails," sounding incredibly demonic, Sonic jumped up with the screech of the chair, half-scaring Tails.

Tails murmured in defense of his point, "Sonic! A-Amy's smart. She would've gotten aboard the train back to Station Square right away."

Sonic's ears drooped as he moped back to the window and leaned into the palm of his hand. "I hope you're right, little buddy...I hope you're right."

Tails sighed in relief with his eyes closed and lips grinning till they were stretched.

"Little buddy," had a nice, familiar ring to it...

"...Was there a strike for the station workers again, though?" Tails asked as he finished screwing the screws into a port of his newly made Chaos Emerald radar, mostly thinking about how they'd probably be going on adventures in up to no time.

"Yeah, and the trains had closed immediately before dawn."

The screwdriver dropped on the floor as Tails and Sonic slowly faced each other. "Closed…?"

The blue speeder swung the door wide open, causing it to slam into the side of the workshop as he whirled into the wilderness. Amy, unfortunately, was never found that night, and Sonic rocked himself in a corner for the rest of it.


	3. Planting Seeds and Roots

_'All that **damn** racket...'_

Shadow slid his eyes open, at first to blink at the ceiling and nurse his ear's ringing, and then to look down his nose, down the fingers tied over his chest, and down the metallic hover-shoes to glare at the termite-eaten door. He was crabby and groggy, his eyes were pink and hot with sleepy tears, he was seeing double, his fur smelt like piss and rabbit shit, and all that ruckus outside was whamming into his skull. Shadow massaged his eyelids and reopened them; he couldn't see any color after the third blink - just a gray and white haze of shapes and squiggles, but his fourth put him out of his colorblindness. His originally childlike nature captured the best of him as he sprang up and realized...the Earth was swimming in gold, and the sun was exploding through the windows. The storm had vanquished, colors were everywhere, and Amy...?

Amy Rose had her face deep in his elbow as she slept. He wasn't appalled, but being so caught off guard triggered the immediate reaction to get away. Shadow tugged from her - lightly, lightly - and stood on his feet. He winded his arm to work out the kinks and dry it of Amy's slobber. Wasting the time to glance back once or twice at the snoring hedgehog at his ankle, he tilted his chin down and walked into the sunbeams that bled into the window. Once he'd opened the door and let the light in, he removed his shading arm from his forehead and eyefully disgested Planet Earth's paradise.

The sparrows perched themselves in the trees to greet him, _"Good morning! Good morning!"_

They fluffed up their breast feathers and shook out all the rime-white water sparkling on their crests. As most used their talons to comb their heads and necks, some tweeted psalms of, _"The Storm is gone! The Storm is gone! All is well! The Storm is gone!"_and cuddled together to relish in their twitter-pated romance.

Deciding to go on an adventure, Shadow hopped from tree to tree to soak in everything around him like a sponge. Everything was so green, so untouched and pure; it unnerved him. Peace was a lie with a warm smile. Body still tight with tension, Shadow leapt off a tree branch and landed on the ground in the open planes, eyes scanning the field as if searching for some kind of ambush.

Butterflies courted, chased, danced, and waltzed. Emerald-green leaves dripped with the last of rain's going. Miles and miles of buds bloomed into blossoms across the fields, welcoming him with, _"This is Earth."_He stood there, a lone shadow in a colorful meadow of nature's riches, feeling out of place and entirely in place. He stood in the wind as minutes passed him by, gradually skinning off his defensive exterior and letting himself trust Earth for a moment. Glancing from side to side to verify that no one was watching, Shadow's half-lidded eyes finally closed. He craned up on his tippy-toes, set his nose against the wind, and breathed in. His chest rose and rose as it filled with the sweet oxygen. That same wind whipped at his forked quills, rippling his fur, stinging the old scabs rooted in the skin underneath. There was no gravity compressing him like Space; there was nothing but freedom.

Shadow never appreciated the sanctum of standing in an open plane of bumblebees in the past. His mind was tanked with priorities, missions, and agendas back then, but now he was a blank sheet ready to be written on, open to learning and absorbing this Planet's nature for Maria and himself.

...Twelve year old Maria would've outshined the sun's yellow with her gold if she stood here in the field with him. His little guardian, his little Messiah; his family. _'Maria...'_

When Shadow was brought into this world, he and Maria believed in magic and _simplicity._ Earth was their dream. Dreaming was the world he knew; the only world he lived on - ...and now, he wished it had never existed. For what would it be like if he were to walk back into that magical world now? Would that world let him back in, with all that he had done to damn it, with all that he _knew_?

Shadow closed his eyes. His hands closed into soft fists. _'No. It would not.'_

But then, just then-something black darted past his head and snapped him into a battle stance. The speck zig-zagged all around him; left, right, up, down, backwards and forwards. It circled and circled and circled him until it had him scrambling to catch the unidentified object and protect himself from its "attacks," but all his strife had him tripping over himself and flailing backwards. His body was soon thrown into a pond that had - undoubtably - ambushed him.

Shadow cursed, sneered, sniffed and spat, drenched in humiliation as water leaked off his ears and nose. The tiny blur stopped and hovered before him as it beat its wings and zipped from here to here to there to there.

...It was a god damn hummingbird

"..Ugh..."

Damn Mother Nature.

* * *

Inside the cabin, Amy Rose was coming to. She yawned and scratched her rump, but ended up doing a double-take on the empty spot beside her.

"Oh no! Shadow's disappeared!"

"I'm right in front of you." Came the voice of the disappeared one.

Amy flew her hands off her cheeks to expel the worried expression she had before. She tilted her head at the wringing-wet hedgehog that was now leaning up against the doorframe a little too coolly. He looked away with his pinkie fishing out whatever possible fish that might've been squirming in his ear.

"...Hey, why are you all wet? Did you go for a swim?"

Shadow's eyebrow ticked; God, the _memory_. "An unplanned dive is more like it."

Amy giggled into her hand.

Shadow paused and stared at her as if he had just embarrassed himself, "...And may I ask what is it you find so 'tickling'?"

"...You're reacting to me more," Amy clasped her hands with her eyes all shimmery. "Oh, don't worry! It's a good thing!"

While Amy giggled and Shadow turned his head in the other direction, he found himself angrily flustered that he couldn't find a better response than, "..._Hmph._."

It hadn't been very long between them, and already the bubbly girl was running circles around him with her naivete.

Something else wracked his mind however as she continued to giggle in the background, and he voiced it out once he had his back to her, "...What did you mean last night, when you said it was all my fault?"

Amy cringed at the offended rumble he renderd it with, and could not think of an excuse or answer that would save her. In the long run of silence, she saddened her wet eyes on her knees and picked at the wheat strands on the floor. She could feel the pressure of his stare crush her. Her hairs stood on her arms. The gravitational force his glower stilled her with was turning her flesh inside out. She wanted to disappear and she wanted him to disappear, so they could both go on with their lives and live. If they could not have any kind of connection or relationship, bitter hate or sweet friendship, then what fate in all the world wanted to make them suffer by being forced together in this predicament?

Shadow's dark eye lingered on her longer.

"Very well," He reverted his gaze to the green world in front of him, and finalized, "...Amy Rose."

His breath was rough, and she couldn't keep the chills from shuddering up and down her spine. The clanks of his metal platform shoes on the floor faded as he walked off the porch. Wary, Amy blinked up to the wide open doorway with her cheeks hot and sweaty from the nervous twist her stomach had underwent. Realizing he had left her, she rubbed her forehead and jogged after him. It was no use - they had to stick together at this point, and she knew he would not leave her on her own to fend for herself in this jungle. He owed her _that_much.

During little to no chatter, the two hedgehogs lost themselves in the jungle's resurrection. It wasn't very often, but every once and again, Amy would catch the hooded fascination baffling Shadow's face as he looked at the terrain. At these moments she'd giggle and smile at the idea of a clueless, almost innocent Shadow the Hedgehog seeing the world for the first time, and he'd catch her in a glare that never held back any detail of confusion. She wasn't intimdated. She was feeling too warm and restored by the curious little faces he made. So, Amy Rose _pushed_her limits.

"Wow, huh?" Amy locked her hands behind her back and squealed like her old self, "I have to admit, after that storm I thought this jungle would be wrecked for good, but just look how beautiful it is! Don't you think so too, Shadow?"

He peeked one eye open at her when she skipped up beside him, making sure to check her reaction to his response, "It's divine..."

Amy rolled her eyes and hummed with the jungle's jazz. She bobbed her head in rhythm with her song as she began to sing some free-styled lyrics to herself, _"I got my map and chose a place where I wanted to go. I know that your lucky color is that cool shade of blue. I guess I'm soooo~ easy to understand~. I just do, whatever, comes to me~ NAT-urally~."_

"There is little to be cheerful about in a situation such as this."

Amy glanced behind her, finger to her lip.

"Yet somehow you manage to be in spite of that," Shadow's solemnity was a contrast to her sweetness.

Her nature was something Maria would bound herself to, so he was not offended by it.

Amy pouted childishly, even though she was inwardly smiling. "That's just how I am, for your information! I'm just a cheerful, cute girl who enjoys life!" She marched on and sang louder in rebellion.

_'…Enjoys life…'_ Shadow rewinded it again and again, until the concept of it was engrained in his brain. Even then, he didn't understand, and only, "Hmph"-ed to redeem his pride.

They walked through the area Shadow's body had been graved in, where Amy stopped to stare into the trench pit she first saw him. Shadow read her face for a long moment in time upon seeing her cheerfulness gone completely. She shut her mouth and walked away from the ditch without so much of a bounce or hum. He later decided her mood-swings were not his priority and continued their quest to reach the train station that she only knew the direction of. Though alas, the trains were closed down due to an accident caused by the storm, and Shadow did not have his Chaos Emerald with him, turning the situation into something for both to snarl at.

"What a load of poo! Now we can't go to Station Square! These past few days have been treachery!" Amy complained and threw a fit as she paced back and forth. "I mean really! What do I have, bad karma or something? Did I break a mirror, what!" she paused oh so abruptly and leaned back. "…Shadow?"

Gone.

He had distanced himself from her and settled in a tree that she most certainly wouldn't dare try climbing.

Amy ran to the tree's trunk, pounded on it once, and shouted up at him; half-confused, all-annoyed. "What's the big idea? Why'd you just leave me like that?"

He tucked his arms over his stomach with a leg dangling from the branch, "I like my space." The hint for her to let him have it. Secretly though, he preferred the jungle's safety over civilization's pubicity, and since the phobia of him having no purpose or destination to pursue at the moment, he needed time to sort out a goal for himself.

Shadow needed a purpose. He needed an _activity_. He needed to _move_. These hover-skates were not meant to stay standing on a bed of flowers, grounded and deflamed. This power was not meant to be leashed and unused. Shadow couldn't stay here or there, in the jungle or the city, and because he had no direction and was curbed by aimlessness, he rooted himself to the tree branch to mull grouchily over it. Amy leaned her back up against the same tree with her glare glued on him, oblivious to his obvious hint. Silence waved its wand and shrouded the spell of curiosity over her.

_'What's he thinking about when he closes his eyes with that reserved look on his face all the time?'_ He shifted his head away from her view, leaving her to work with only his profile. _'He's so mysterious and...and just like a shadow!'_ "...shadow…" she murmured to herself. _'...That would make some good poetry.'_

He unpried an eyelid and wrinkled his nose from a short snort. "What is it?"

She flushed in surprise of being knocked out of her daydreaming all of the sudden, and now looked down to prove her jumpiness. "I didn't say anything...!"

Shadow lingered on her reaction. But, after lost of interest and concern, he flattened his eyes and shut them and the world out once more. Amy held fast to her worried face as she risked another glimpse of him from under her bangs.

The stygian hedgehog looked among the trees at this time, lids half-risen above the red optics that had captured the sunrays in their rubies. He was suddenly a still, and surreal life portrait, from his change of body language to the feathery movement of his chest's ivory strands as he inhaled the jungle, losing himself in it, letting it drown all his senses into the senselessness that allowed him to reveal who he truly was ― a dreamer. Amy's fingers couldn't sit still in her lap and her stomach flip-flopped; his eyes opened more, their colors glazed over and gleaming like a red galaxy of stars. This must've been the expression he held when he and Maria dreamt about Earth's wonders. _'_

_He looks different...'_ Amy was sweating at the back of the neck. _'But maybe I'm just reacting to it because…' _"He looks like Sonic…when Sonic used to drift off into another world all starry-eyed and enraptured..."

"I presumed you were too disgruntled over Sonic's presence to be mentioning him in the same sentence as myself," Shadow's scoff killed the moment.

"Eep!" Amy jumped out of her skin.

What she had seen earlier of him was nothing but past-tense, because the eyes that had been so celestial in beauty were now throwing daggers at her.

"Wh-What are you mumbling up there?" Amy puffed up her cheeks like a blowfish.

"Well then...I suppose we'll have our share of pointing fingers," Shadow smirked, eyes shut and musing. "If I am not mistaken, which I'm sure of, it was you who was _mumbling_, 'He looks like Sonic,' was it not?"

Still, she had to admit, this was a mouthful for the anti-social Shadow the Hedgehog. "I was just thinking to myself out loud, that's all!" She went into her hissy-fit behavior.

"I want to know the cause and effect for 'thinking' _that_'out loud'."

Amy snubbed her head away and crossed her arms; he was getting his _kicks_ from provoking her. "Then I'll have to leave your wondering, _nosy_."

"Fine then. I do not wish to know," Shadow shrugged a shoulder as he twiddled a leaf in lazy boredom. "I will take it as you hallucinating me as your 'heroic hero' to quench your unrequited feelin―"

"The _last thing_ I want is for Sonic to ever become _you_!" Amy sprang up with her legs spanned out, balled fists, and glare harder than rock as tears slogged over her vision.

Although it grew silent other than Amy's huffing and puffing, she knew she had stabbed the black hedgehog in a zone that would've cost her an amputated tongue. Although her fists were shaking, she knew that _he_ knew she spat with hate. Although her shoulders began convulsing, she knew it wasn't the hate for _him_. Although she screamed this...she could never bring herself to hate _any_living soul.

Shadow's grimace cut in deeper as he watched her break.

Amy slobbered over all her yelling and all her frustration with the wailing of a Banshee, "Why'd you have to _'die'_, Shadow? _Why_? Why'd Sonic have to―..." Tears walled up her eyes once more as she lowered her fists in disbelief of herself, "...I..." she shook her head slowly, before turning away and threading her fingers in her bangs to get a hold of her marbles, "...I don't know what's wrong with me..." she whispered in the pit of her fear. "It's like a have a fever, all the _time_, I...I'm all messed up..." she sunk down to her knees and caressed her forehead with both palms. "Everything's all messed _up_..."

Shadow the Hedgehog dropped down right in front of her before she could holler out her weeps for the crisis her world had fallen into this year. Her head fell back with a choked gasp to look up at him between all the tears in awe. After absorbing the impact in his legs, he slowly stood upright with his shadow eclipsing her. He neither moved nor spoke, but observed her under wandering eyes. They were glassy again, red pools with underwater sunlight, and with the sun breaking through the trees and the shadow of the leaves dancing across his face, she suddenly felt..._safe_in all his enigma. Safe enough to tell him all her fears.

The makings of a pained smile quirked at the corner of Amy's lips as she shook her head up at him, shrugging, "It's all messed up...my head," - she touched her temple - "Sonic's head...everything's all messed up..." Her voice died into her throat.

Shadow bent down before her with his elbows on his knees and his concentration not running anywhere else but between her teary emeralds.

"What...has _happened_ since my alleged 'death', Amy Rose?" He cocked his head with the narrowing of one eye, _trying_to grasp the severity of her dilemma by watching her sidewardly. Things had been all too abnormal for her for his stomach to take lightly to.

"...Dreams aren't so shiny anymore," She gazed him directly in the eye, taking in his visage, and at the same time not really seeing him, but drowning in her problems and rambling into mindlessness as she rocked back and forth. "Sonic used to be bright blue, but now he's lost greyish blue...he's not Sonie anymore, and..." she sucked in a breath that hurt her ribs, "...It's like, the _whole_world is topsy-turvy and unhappy. Ever since we met you and...ever since you died, you...stripped away all the colors of the our lives and left it bare and shivering with reality...and reality is ugly, and its so cold...it's not shiny like my dreams, or Sonie's dreams. It's not warm anymore. You and Gerald made happiness look insignificant to loss. You made Sonic sad...you made the world sad...and I think...I think Sonic cries sometimes..."

Shadow's unblinking, half-lidded gaze swam and pulsed at the morbidity that spluttered out of Amy Rose. His heartbeat couldn't choose whether to be hysterical with slow anger or slowed down by hysterical pity because of the rivulets swimming down her cheeks. He leaned back, away from her and the instability that she breathed. Suddenly, on an instinct's jump, Amy threw herself at him and shattered dignity.

"I want him back the way he was...!" She dramatized as she attempted to fly her arms around the black body for solace, but Shadow stopped her at the elbows beforehand. "...H-Huh?" She squinted up at the dark hero who held her back with the tears still varnishing her orbs. "What did I do...?" she panicked when all he did was stare at her without an expression. "What did I _do_?"

-"You must _realize_...that you can not have him back through me," Shadow's handle on her elbows tightened as did his face. There was no derision or vexation in his wording, but a generalization of having been offended. "For I will not paint myself blue to heal your wounds for only a short period of time. I will not be a part of your self-deception to lend a false lullably to soothe your ears. This is not the solution."

"No," Amy tried to justify her clinginess, "No, that's not...what? _No_!" she spanked her hands on his chest to clout him for assuming these claims and defended herself against them, "I'm not asking you to...stand _still_ so I can embrace you and fantasize you as Sonic! I just need the _comfort_...!" her shoulders sagged when her screaming soddened into helpless whispers that begged him to understand. "I just need...to be told that everything's going to be okay, to be _lied_ to, to be..." Her mouth shuddered open as she stared into the white fur splashed on his chest. Her eyes weakened into strained squints to block the tears back, "...I just need to hold onto some sanity by holding onto_something..._" Her head was boggling from rationality to madness as her emotions choked her into an onslaught of sobs. "Because I know I can't have him back unless I _do_something...I'm losing him-"

"_Everyone_ must experience a critical collapse of life as they know it before they are worthy of reaching the final resolution, and understanding the _meaning_of that life."

Amy flung her head up to him in a fit of shock. Shadow's look had not changed; it was the same as it was the day he had made his presence known to Station Square, but this time, there lied no thirst for blood-gush. Amy whimpered lightly as his fingers bored into her skin, drilling moon-crests into it. Shadow brought her body closer with an intensity in his stare that did not bode well with her stomach. She held her trembling hands to her breasts as his musty breath fell upon her.

"Everyone _crawls_, everyone _suffers._ The world does not pick and choose its favorites, and Sonic the Hedgehog is no exception, for he is not the Holy Grail. He is made of the same organic matter everyone else is materialized from," with his stare bleeding into her, Shadow finalized so that she could hang onto every single word of it, "...It is _not_ your responsibility or your _failure_. It is his, and his alone. This is a fight he must overcome on his own."

Studying her eyes and the liquid filming over them, Shadow's restraint loosened on her forearms, but did not let go. Amy bit her lip and covered her mouth. She stole this unspoken acceptance by nose-diving into Shadow and crying her heart out against him. Amy tried to bury her little body deeper into his chest to disappear forever. She tugged at the shiny black sea that was his coat. Her tears dampened his white, fluffy tuff as she rubbed her cheeks against it, seeking comfort.

He was warm. Dry, and warm.

As the seconds elongated into minutes of tear-shed, Shadow closed his eyes and opened them to the birds overhead. His red iris held the sky's reflection. _'...Cry, foolish girl...for you love too selflessly.'_

He allowed her to cry until the muscles in her face were numb and feelingless as the pieces in his mind attached themselves. Amy Rose was losing her loved one. Not in the scandalous treachery he had lost his, but the one she worshipped was disappearing from her life all the same, and she had not known how to accept it. Pain was pain. It was not varied. Yet, it would be foolish of him to deny that, he missed this warmth - the warmth of another body smaller than his, _welcoming _his.

"...You're finally reacting to me," Amy's lips moved against blades of his chestfur.

Lines welled down on Shadow's forehead, "...I have done nothing."

She adjusted herself into a more comfortable position against his heartbeat as her soggy eyes whirled across the jungle's ground, "...Shadow?" Her fingers wormed into his fur and lost themselves there. "...What were you thinking earlier, when you were in the tree...looking _like that_?"

"And I am expected to know what 'like that' refers to?"

She nodded feverishly against the short locks of fur that tickled her eye, curling strands around her finger.

Shadow looked on blankly, and slowly moved away from her to stand, "I was thinking about the oath I bestowed upon you on Space Colony Ark."

Amy's eyeballs bulged from where she sat on the ground.

**_"I have to keep my promise to Maria…and you."_**

She poked her forefingers together and nodded, smiling in memory, "And you fulfilled it too…"

...Sensing a mistake because of her heartfelt reaction, Shadow crossed his arms and tossed his head away with the swish of his quills, "Do not proceed to doodle my name on your binder―"

"Oh stop, will you?" She set her hands on her hips. "I didn't take it like that. I remember the moment well enough."

Both hedgehogs shifted awkwardly as the replay of the moment haunted them. If either could put into words exactly how important that moment was to their growth as individuals, it would be most difficult to achieve. Reliving the perhaps one-sided chemistry and effect of that moment was too overwhelming for Shadow to reminiscence back at a time like this. It wasn't as if she ever accepted or reacted to the promise he'd given her, but the way she was fondly looking up at him in this moment like some kind of lost brother didn't sit well with him.

"Now then," His glare sharpened at his eye's red corners. "I have granted you your wish, so it is your turn to grant me an answer as to why you said my name that way."

Her head dipped to the side. Amy steadied up on her feet and dusted her shorts off, ""…What way...? When?"

"Earlier."

"Earlier?" She laid a thoughtful finger on her chin. "How did I _say it_earlier?"

"...That _way_," he gnarled at how he couldn't place his wordings into one sentence. "The way..." his eyes widened, then narrowed, and before she could interpret the meaning behind the angered emotion scalding him, he looked to the right of him to save his dignity. "The way that Maria once said it."

She meeped, cheeks blossoming pinker. _'The way Maria...?'_her chest throbbed.

He sided his eyes back to her in a lazy sidelong glance, and soon slanted them into suspicion, "...You were thinking of me then, _weren't _you, Rose?" It sounded like he was accusing her of homicide!

_'Yes.' _"No!"

"Then why does that full-battery-charged voice of yours itch with palpable clues of nervousness and lies?"

"Wha...? What LANGUAGE are you...? OOH, I was thinking…about Sonic, there!"

"You're _lying._"

Amy flailed her fists around and jabbed at his nose with her finger, secretly wanting to laugh, "Oh you're just CONFIDENT that you're psychic, aren't you?"

Before Shadow replied with that clueless blink of his that made him look harmless, he tensed up and rounded his head back to the jungle, though this time, in urgency. His heightened hearing aligned him to the whereabouts beside and behind him. His head was jerking about frantically, and it was making Amy nervous.

"Shadow?" Amy leaned sideways to see his face. "What's wrong…?"

He stepped in front of her shorter stature, his mind singled on one thing.

"Shadow?" Amy began to panic.

After his killing eyes scanned for assurance, he looked to her from beyond his shoulder and grounded out, "Let's get moving."

An unaware Amy watched an aware Shadow leave. "You know, you owe me one…again."

"Hmph."

The young girl wagged a finger. "You should be more cheerful, Shadow! Smile for once! OH, I know!" Amy bounced up and down. "How about a song?" she walked backwards alongside Shadow. His legs were much longer than hers, she hypothesized. Three steps for her was one step for him.

He shut his eyes. "I prefer to pass…"

"Sweet, sweet you're so sweet—So many things I waannnt!"

"No thanks."

"Sweet, sweet you're so sweet—I wanna beee a wonderfuuuull girrrl!"

"I will bid you kindly to stop singing." .

"Sweet, sweet you're so sweet—I'm not simple mindeeed!"

...Shadow mentally smirked, and verbally bluffed, "…No, you're IRKING."

"Sweet, sweet you're so-..." She blinked, but then gave her trademark pout and started stomping around like a goblin. "Why, YOU!"

A stocial smirk curled on his face. Perfect; he knew that'd get her. Later in life it might disturb him by how he suddenly got his sadistic 'kicks' out of provoking Amy Rose. It was true that he made up that little 'you're irking' punch-line all her friends had insulted her with. In truth, she didn't annoy him. Despite what most would believe, Shadow's tolerance and composure was not so easily crushed; he could be quite the manipulative jester and enjoyed watching others blow up through his taunts. Only one hegdehog had that priviledge to blow him up: Sonic.

For unsaid safety, Shadow requested they stay near a clearing by the lake, "Elysium Purity," but the during the walk, he didn't bother socializing.

Amy was annoyed and tried starting a conversation. "It's too bad when don't have an Emerald...but maybe we can go to Tails' Workshop and ask him for an Emerald radar? And maybe Sonic will be there!" She stood with her toes turning inward. "Oh Shadow, he'll be so happy to see you! Please say you'll go!"

He did not look at her; his expression never varied through the stages of annoyance or defensiveness and stayed unemotional, but the emotion filtered back into him after his ears perked up like antennas.

"...Shadow?" At the tap on his shoulder and the flick of a wrist, Shadow snapped out of his tension with exaggerated alarm.

Amy tilted her head and pursed her lips, "What's wrong now, silly?"

"...Nothing to concern yourself with. I will handle it," Shadow avoided her.

The anomalous ordor in the trees was gone, but he wasn't so naive. They were being stalked.

"Of course I should! I mean, that's what friends are supposed to do! CARE! And we tell each other what's on the other's mind," Amy counted off on her fingers, tweeting almost. "We help each other through the worst times―"

He didn't want all of that. He feared that he may long for her presence with a needy, psychological cling all because she resembled the life he lived before, the sister he loved before. He might become drawn to her because of her positive outlook on things - because she almost seemed like an acceptable candidate, a _substitution_, even - to help him back into the gates of the world he disgraced, and once missed living in. A perfect tool that would get him back inside.

He examined Amy with a confused frown that she gave right back. He made the comparisons, the contrasts, and the conclusions. No; she was not on Maria's level. Not even close, as to no one would be, and yet in the same light, she had something...―Shadow squinted to see it―..._else._

"...So...what exactly would you propose right now?"

"A wish."

...Amy blinked. "You want to grant me a wish? Like...a Jeanie?"

Shadow shot her a flat frown before explaining himself, "I will grant you one wish and one only to clear my debt, but it must be something I can and will oblige to. For now, I will offer security. I may be distant, but I am not cheap. That is all."

"Well that's...HEY, hold the phone!" Amy crossed her arms. "You think I'm too weak to fend for myself? I'm not some helpless little girl who needs to be babysat! There's nothing out here, anyway!"

"...Very well," Shadow took a serious step back from her.

The bush behind her rustled.

"GAH!" Amy's fur frizzed on end like a bout of electricity had shot up her body before she shrieked and jumped behind him for safety.

Shadow stared at the bug-eyed hedgehog with inexpressive amusement, "Hmph. Turns out to be more of a fact than an assumption." Before she could react, he removed himself from being her shelter shield and walked on. "Let's move," Shadow said with head down, eyes shut, but hands fisted.

Amy fiddled on her shirt some before catching up in step with him.

_'But still…'_ His sights roamed the backwoods. _'I've gotten the feeling that one portion of this debt is going to be paid a bit earlier than scheduled."_

Amy still wasn't off their original subject, "Shadow...what I was saying before...I was only trying to help you―"

His head snapped back around to her, and his eyes blazed with an obsession for this question's answer, "_Why_?" Was she trying to build a trap for him?

"…Because that's who I am―I _care_," Amy stomped her foot down. "What happened on Ark was horrible! What Gerald re-programmed you for was wrong! What the military did to you and Maria was wrong! But what's so _wrong_about me offering friendship to you?"

He took note of the sadness throttling at her throat, but soon concluded, "You concern yourself with what does not involve you."

She couldn't face his eyes, "All I want is to help...!" A smile tickled the corner of her mouth. "Everyone else thinks so badly of you...but they didn't see what I saw back on Ark."

Shadow froze; that's right.

...She had seen him cry, didn't she? She had heard him talk softly, gently - the way he did to one person only. She had been privileged with a sincerity he never gave anyone―a _promise_. In every promise of his, there was a heart. His heart. Shadow's fingers twitched. She had seen what Maria had seen daily in just thirty seconds. Shadow peeked back at Amy reluctantly. She cocked her head with a hopeful little smile on her face. He had let this girl into him more than he had realized.

Amy suddenly beamed with an excitement that made him flinch. "I know you're not as rough around the edges as you act! I know once upon a time, you used to smile and be happy too, just like everyone else!"

His fingers gritted together.

Amy closed in on his face, still smiling her hundred watts smile. "You're just a grumpy ol' bear with a thorn stuck in his paw, that's all! That's why you attack anyone who steps into your territory..." Amy stared long and hard to interpret and mind-read what might be going on in his head. "What do you think?"

Ruby and emerald acknowledged one another.

Shadow steeled his exposure and closed eyes to finally jerk his head away, giving off a _"Thanks, but no thanks," _vibe. Oy? Was he POUTING a little, too?

Amy's smile faulted into sweat-dropping sarcasm. _'What a ninny!'_"You really are a shadow, Shadow!" She gave him a disappointed frown, but perked right back up.

His reactions lifted her spirits, despite what kinds of reactions they were. "But that's okay, I'd expect something like that from you." She giggled and poked him in the nose.

For some reason, she had turned blissful again at the blink of his eye, but these blinking eyes of his darkened. "I do not warn you to keep your charity to yourself because I am 'cold at heart'. I warn you because you don't know what you're getting yourself into. _Curiosity_ killed the cat." He didn't want this for _anyone _who got too close, not even a kitten. He was responsible for his own life, not someone else's.

"And kindness mended the Shadow!" Amy retracted and twirled around in her own waltz.

She stopped in a sort of shoulder pose to look back at him with her sunny smile, extravagant happiness that twinkled in her eyes, and her three pink bangs and kiss-curl quills caught on a breeze.

The still-life moment was enough to have him staring. Even if not in awestruck, he was being sucked into remembering what he lacked and once had: mindfields of innocence, and did she have it.

"Come on, let's go to this lake already!" Amy was already ahead of him. "Hurry up, Shadow!"

He just looked on, confused, disgusted by that confusion, horrified by how her naive and sinless nature tied his tongue into that confusion. It was profane how her presence made him soft. On Ark, it was a mystery that he hadn't turned on her when she nagged him for his help. He was soft with her then, lowering his voice to an almost perky whisper that became even perkier when she triggered that memory out of his brain.

"Hey! Slow poke, try and keep up with me, will ya?" Amy wiggled her bottom.

Shadow snapped back to the present. His lips sneered into an arrow-shaped smirk when he realized that she was challenging him. He crossed his arms into his signature pose, "Hmph, an Ultimate Lifeform such as myself does not classify under 'slow poke'."

"You are now, Mister Ultimate!" She stuck out her tongue and pulled down the pink of her eyelid.

She was never all that concerned that her last taunt would mark the end of her joking. She laughed hard enough for her stomach to contract when he proved her wrong with all that unnecessary determination of his.


	4. A Bouquet of Thorns

**_Chapter: A Bouquet of Thorns_**

* * *

**"~*** stands for a character's point of view entry.

* * *

Near _Lake Elysium_, the black hedgehog eased down into the heart of a meadow that was aglow with lemon-ivory lilies. Shadow crossed his legs, scratched his thigh, and adjusted his hands behind his quills to rest his back on the flowers. Still, with all this tranquility, Shadow the Hedgehog was far from appeased.

That girl's been gone for fifteen minutes; my foot's been tapping for _five_.

Just what is she _doing_?

My eyelids were twitching to add more of a dramatic effect to this nauseating worry I'm clinging onto. I'm beyond the shadow of doubt at peace, surrounded by nothing but me, myself and I...and of course, an uncivilized world I've undeniably grown fond of, yet in the midst of all that perfection, my mind is running WILD because of the _absence_ of the color _pink._How clever of my subconscious to play such cruel pranks on me.

"...Mm?" The sound of a squeal shot me up from my uncomfortable dozing.

"Shadow! Shadow! Look what I found!" The pink hedgehog's rhaspodic squeal. Well, to be more frank, hyperactive _screech._

...So this means my paranoia was in vain; good.

"C'mon, take a look!" I blink my eyes open wider; she's skipping in my direction with an exotic bouquet of...multi-colored flowers I have never seen before. Did these species of flowers normally breed in jungles? I think not. Amy Rose plopped down beside me and buried her nose between the unspecified flora, inhaling deep, and then exhaling as though she had awoken from a dream.

"I absolutely ADORE roses!" She slowly raises her head with a giddy look on her face.

I dip my head to the left, the higher ear twitching in a semi quarter of distraction from the jungle in our background, while the rest of me stayed intrigued with the extravagant wreath. Where exactly did she _get_them?

"I found them on the back porch of that old cabin we stayed in last night! The pot they were in shattered!" She reads my mind at the snap of one's fingers, and I then understand that she didn't pick a bouquet at all, but swiped growing, 'helpless' roses off the vacant property.

I gaze off into the miles ahead and vague out as I tell her distantly, "You must return them to their original location."

"...Really?" The perk in her voice had dropped.

"These roses are nurtured and fresh; far too young for one to believe that the rotting cabin's roof we sheltered under had been abandoned for years." I touch a petal, "Whomever inhabited that cabin, has _not_ been away for very long. If the only reality they choose to take care of is their _roses_ instead of their vermin-infested living quarters, then I can't say they're anything short of a _mental disability. _Silly as it may be, I do not want to find myself tackling an unnecessary enemy because their 'precious roses' have been stolen. An entity has been stalking us as of late―"

"What!" Amy's shriek compelled me to squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate on forcing the ring out of my eyes. "You never informed me of THAT, Mister!"

"I will take care of it," I massaged my ear calmly. "Your concern will only become baggage."

She seemed to frown at me, but that same frown melted into a smile that was too big for her small, stubby cheeks, "I know! Because you're _Shadow_ the, _Ultimate Lifeform!_" Her attempt at mocking a male announcer humored me, to some degree. Her wild giggles substitute the laughter I can not laugh. "But can I at least tell you the meaning of each rose's color? It's really interesting!"

This time, _I _frown at her, though not out of irritation or anything of the like. No. more out of an uncertainty she quickly caught on to.

"Heh, here! Just listen, it'll only take a minute!" She begins translating each rose color to me, ever so often failing to hide her 'tee-hee'-ing at the keen interest that was written all over my face, "The red rose symbolizes true love stronger than thorns, see? True red is the Lover's rose." She gazes at her discovery with a soothing smile I don't remember seeing in the past. "You see, a fully-bloomed red rose means, 'I still love you…'"

...It does?

I close my mouth and look back down at these..._immortal _plants. It is not untill I see the reddest rose of them all being thrust into my face does my earnestness towards her rose-biography break.

"Here."

I lift my head, looking past the rose petals, the white fingers holding the steam, and into the green eyes of the hedgehog I can not comprehend. Her innocence, however, is not foreign. It is something of a healing relief - a relic from a lifetime ago.

Her smile is full of white teeth and suppressed giggles. "It's for the love in your heart."

"...Had we not ended this discussion in the cabin?"

"Everyone has love in their hearts, Shadow, for without that you'd be heartless."

My eyes slant and I look at her sideways, lip riding back over my fangs. Her smile vanishes, and the terror of her mistake replaces it.

I disregard the roses and push the offered one away like a child. "I don't want it."

The instant I turn away was the instant I felt delicate petals tickle my chin. She's shoving it into me again; curse her persistence. "Don't be such a baby! Take it! It's a gift!"

"Hmph," I fold my arms and turn away. "I'm not interested."

Her head follows mine as she whines, "Come _on_, Shadow…at least have what represents a heart if you think you're devoid of one. Besides, it can remind you of me! Your little..." - a snicker squeaked out - "light in the dark!"

I inspect her awkwardly. Why did she keep reciting this poetry? Why did she want to be my 'little light'? Where's your romantic fantasy to be Sonic's bride? You can't be both. Yet, the smile she nags me with is...

...I'm still struggling to get used to this girl. Having been stripped away from _that world_ for so long, it's more than difficult to fall back into feeling natural with someone of a mindset I had once befriended fifty-one years ago. Talking to Amy Rose coherently seems humiliatingly impossible, yet I feel a sort of..._potential_within me by being in this innocuous atmosphere of hers. The potential for what? I shall not think so deeply into it just yet.

"..._Hmph,_" I reach out to grab at the rose's stem, but the thorns puncture my glove with objection. I dump the rose to flip my hand over, studying the drop of blood pooling at my finger's head and the dots of red oozling off the rose's thorn.

To me, this red rose has screamed an entirely different meaning to contradict its reputation. It has proven to represent malice, not true love. However, the blood I'm rubbing my thumb and forefinger against is what makes me feel...organically mortal. The prickle from the cut has evolved into a pure delight of astoundment.

Great, I'm a mascochist.

"I'm sorry!" Sonic's self-proclaimed love interest squeals, and I regain reason. "I forgot to warn you about those thorns!" The girl picks it up as if it were materialized from glass.

"Forget it, I don't want it. I don't want your..." my nose wiggles for the appropriate terminology. "...Your rose's _love._"

She bites the corner of her lip and twirls the rose. What kind of face is that? What are you implying by it? "…Is that why you never smile…?"

Or so I think that's what she said to me. I'm not paying attention to her, to be just. No, I'm half-hearing her; I'm too subjugated by the resplendent white rose the pink youth huddled so protectively to her. When she finds where my interests are residing, she gasps, just loud enough to make my ear cringe, but not loud enough to draw complete attention to her. Her white fingers curl around the underside of the rose, and my head whispers frenetically with a surging anger for her not to damage or bend it.

"These ones represent love stronger than death. Some people call it the 'flower of light,'" she spun its stem, and I growl an indirect reprimand for her to stop what she's doing in case she breaks it, and she obeys at my command. "I...was going to keep it, but…"

My eyes throb; the white was bewitching, _promising_, much more pure and convincingly innocent than the red.

"...Love stronger than death," the Pink mumbles, incising my patience.

"…Give me the love that's stronger than death."

Amy jerks up, breath caught, ears high, and cheeks warm. By this, I am stolen away from my lust for the white. The look she is giving me ruins the stoicism I had so well mastered.

"The _rose_, Amy..." I summons her for it, and for her to comprehend my original meaning, if there be some other absurbity floating around in her mind.

"Oh! Y-yeah, sure!" She practically flings it at me.

"Be careful, would you?" It was too much of a juggle to catch it.

Her eyes shine. Scintillation with light that resembles the rime-water pearling the rose. She inquires me vaguely, "...What...do you mean by that?"

"Your cheeks are pespiring with pink and your body genuflection is unusual. Need I list more?"

Her eyes fall with a smile as that pespiring pink still slimes the originally tan skin of her cheeks. "Funny, I didn't think you paid that much attention…"

"...Do not get the wrong idea."

"No, it's just that…when you asked if you could have that rose…I thought you meant…something else," She held a cheek and looked elsewhere - not out of swooning or fantasizing, but out of humiliation, fret, and horrified disbelief of herself.

...I uncross my arms. She bared her hands down on her knees. Her untamed fantasies have gone too far. You've tampered and gambled more than you can bargain, little girl. I stand from the level on the ground and ball my fists at my thighs, my chest heaved out to prove my authority and power as she holds my heartless glare. All that blushing is gone for good.

Never, will and would I love you.

Though I do not speak, her eyes seem to lose their light; her face-its color. Her silence tells me all I need to know.

I turn from her without another thought and head off for the jungle, still carrying the white rose that dangles from my limp hand as I seethe out self-hatred, "...Because a weapon does not have feelings to feel such things _with_...A weapon for mass destruction, can not love...not in the way you love your precious Sonic."

And if I were as naive as you, pink hedgehog, I could live on lying with a smile. For that, I...am jealous of you.

* * *

Sonic slammed the door so hard behind him that the floor's panes beneath him shook at the shift in gravity's obvious temper.

"Geez, Sonic!" Tails complained, lifting a lense of his safety goggles with his thumb. "Are you trying to break my door or just crack the wall?"

Sonic paced back and forth across the lab room with his hands behind his back, before whipping around to his partner in training, "I still haven't found Amy!"

Tails jumped at Sonic's ferocity and had to scramble to keep his goggles on his head, "A-Aren't the trains working by now?"

"Storm disaster, operation busted," Sonic slinked over to the couch and sunk into its cushiony solace, whistling out a breath to unruffle himself.

"Maybe you haven't looked hard enough. I mean, judging by the way you treated her yesterday, she may not want to be found.—Hang on!" Tails snapped his fingers as the mental lightbulb switched on above his head. "What about Elysium Purity?"

"Elise-wha?"

"Elysium Purity?"

"Elysium Puberty? …What kind of perverted—"

"ELYSIUM PURITY!"

"OH! ...Whas' that?"

Tails had to bite back a laugh. That dopey glint in Sonic's eye meant that, very slowly, the original Sonic was crawling back into the sodium light. "Don't you ever get new updates from the explorers around here? Elysium Purity is the lake one of them were researching, not to mention huge. Its waters have been untouched, so it's almost like a mutant pond of crystals and underwater sun. Its rumored to be spellbound."

Sonic smacked his lips and flattened his eyes, unknowingly digging in his ear; an old habit for the blue hedgehog that hadn't been done in a year, "...Ehhh, never heard of it."

Tails sighed, but rather happily. The happiness wasn't budding in his little pit because Amy was lost. It was budding in theory that, because Amy was lost, Sonic was unrolling more feelings that had been neglected from his friends for what seemed to be decades.

Practically glowing from head to toe, Tails yanked for Sonic's arm with galleons of enthusiasm, "Come on, if I know Amy like I do, she'd probably be there!"

"Wha, hey, just wait a minute-" Sonic sweat-dropped and pulled his ears back whilst being led, or in his preference, dragged by an overexcited fox full of some otherworldly exultation. "You're not exactly striking up the right tone to all this, Tails!"

Tails wasn't listening, either. He bounded to the door with an almost-laughy, "Don't worry, Sonic! We'll find Amy in no time!"

Just then, Sonic the Hedgehog ripped his wrist out of Tails's hold.

Tails tripped over his shoes from the uncalled-for rejection, but managed to steady himself. His heart a half-full cup of courage, Tails peeked his head around his tremulant shoulder to blink at Sonic, "...S...Sonic?"

What he expected to be faced with was a blue hedgehog with a gruesomely grim demeanour blackening him, but he didn't get his expectations. Sonic was in battle position and his ears were forked, concentrating on the sonar of whatever movement it is he heard.

"...Sonic?" Tails about-faced.

Sonic's finger was gradually put to his puckered lips as he glared around the room, "Shhh..."

Tails cleaned out his ear and listened in―a humming vibration.

Sonic grabbed the young fox and frisked out of the way, just missing the explosion of the workshop's door along with the thousands of flying wood-splinters. Smoke suffocated the fox's home as well as the crumbling avalanche of the walls. Tails calmed his hyperventilating after the many gags and strangled coughs.

He staggered up from the destroyed ground, shading his eyes and squinting them only to find the hole that now marked where a door once existed. "Great, now I have to replace my door again from the last time you "spin-dashed" into it!"

Sonic was preoccupied by the silhouette in the ex-doorway. He pushed up off his knees and stumbled sidewards.

"...I...Is that?" Sonic's bloodstream had weakened in flow, leaving his blue and beige clashes the drained color of a fish's belly.

It was.

"...No WAY!" Tails leapt back, his jaw rolled out over his feet.

The side of Sonic's open mouth convulsed. His eyes pulsed like the Master Emerald, and his quills arched from irrepressible overwhelm muddled in exhilaration.

"You...what..." Sonic hobbled forward, the grin sinking, but his birdlike eyes never shrinking back to their healthy size. "...What are you_doing_here?"

All the questions swimming around him could be asked later. All the awe knotting in his gut, all the relief. His palms were shaking. The sweat was making his glove stick to his hand.

Tails, on the other hand, did have an affected response to the shadow standing before them against the sun's yellow blaze, but he put on a more guarded act, "It's great that you're here, honest, it is...but..." his ears drooped. "...Ever heard of knocking, at least?"

"_Tails!_" Sonic whirled on Tails in a vicious nature that wasn't like him, scaring Tails to death and frightening his ears to cower back.

The shadow clouded by the billows of smoke never wavered. The voice of the dark being was hard and evil to Tails's disliking ears, "Sonic the Hedgehog?"

"That's my name, and don't wear it out!" Sonic jabbed a proud thumb into his chest in a sing-song toot that was high-pitched and even further off pitch.

It was like his brain was churning and his nerves were cracking because of too much hyper-happiness. His smile was stiffer than any board, and his pupils were pinprick dots. A psychotic, bi-polar look.

"I've waited a long, long time…" the black in the doorway approached them. He rested his paw against Sonic's forehead. "...To see you once more, my old _friend_."

Bags of gray hollowed and wrinkled under Sonic's once smiling eyes as his grin died with his happiness. An orbit of flaming light shone from the middle of the stranger's palm as he caressed a red Chaos Emerald, licking his lips.

Sonic choked and froze. Tails hollered and charged. Blood exploded across the wood floors like red stars. Laughter shook the jungle.

* * *

Higher-ground was the safest place at the moment to escape the pink. Sitting in the highest tree to find, Shadow rotated the white rose with a glare burning into its petals.

He thinned his eyes, bared a fang, and threw it to the ground below, spitting to no one's particular company, "Little light…hmph, don't count on it."

"So…" an uninvited voice sang. "Weapons don't have real feelings too, huh?"

Shadow leaned over a branch. His fur bristled to discover the smiling, winsome Amy Rose standing down below with the rose he had discarded.

_'How is it that she's bursting and beaming with vibrance in this moment?'_Shadow doesn't glare at her as he thinks this; he simply stares in disturbance. Though like that fact touched a nerve, Shadow darkened back into exasperation and withdrew from peering across the branch. "You never cease to surprise me."

"I just realized that it's also true about a red and white rose meaning eternal togetherness! You're right that weapons can't love…but you're not a weapon," and Amy Rose sounded fairly sure of herself.

"Hmph."

Amy pouted. "I remember what I saw on Ark! I remember how glad you were about fulfilling Maria's promise, about making the world happy and dedicating your life to that promise. I remember that look of unconditional love and devotion in your eyes. I've never seen so much love in one place before; not even in my eyes...not even in Sonic's eyes. Weapons can't have eyes like that," She mumbled softly. "Your capacity is bigger than all of ours..."

...Shadow closed his eyes. "What is it that you wish to gain from me?"

She dug her toe into the ground with her fingers linking behind her. "Stuff isn't always about profit and gain, Shadow. Seeing someone happy is enough. _Friendship_is enough. I like helping people and proving that there's a good side to life, like Sonic does! Besides, even if you don't know why you're still here, you still have people who are willing to help you find out why! Is that so dangerous?"

_'She desires too much to help me.'_

And it disheartened and heartened him. His past was not for the stomach of a little girl. It would damage her mind. She should be wasting her life _on_her life, not him. Before long, birds flocked and squawked from the jungle in every direction. Something was very wrong.

"Th―That's a lot of spooked birds..." Amy murmured after an occasional, but unsettled blink.

Shadow began examining the trees. He suddenly landed before her, scattering her nerves.

"We're leaving."

"Eh? Why?"

"There's no time to explain. I'm taking you back to Station Square where you will be safer."

"…But...but the trains!"

Shadow's green Emerald reflected off her own emeralds as he raised it to her eye-level.

"…But I thought—"

"I found it on my mission to get away from your 'roses.'" He brought it high to the skies, preparing for Chaos Control as he opened an arm for her to take.

"_No_!" Amy gave him a stubborn frown and clung onto her shorts. "…I don't want to go back just yet!" _'I'm not ready to face Sonie...HE'S not ready...'_

"This is no time to be obstinate," He pulled her to him by the wrist.

"I'm not going!" She swung his hand off and stepped closer to bare her own teeth, which were all fang-less and rather unintimidating.

But Shadow the Hedgehog stepped back defensively―and she knew why. Exactly why, and it had nothing to do with her herbivore teeth.

"What is it with you?" Amy continued to stare at the black hedgehog, narrowing her eyes at him. "Why won't you let your barrier down…?"

As Amy stepped even closer, Shadow stared at her, confused and penetrated as he took more steps back.

The pink hedgehog locked her eyes with his. "…Just because your name is Shadow doesn't mean you have to act like one!"

Her sympathetic yet demanding demeanor made Shadow tense. "What, pray tell, are you reciting about now, Rose?"

Amy moved in on the kill. "You've got your guard up right now, even when there's not an enemy for a million miles!"

There were too many emotions in her eyes, too much overwhelming him all at once. Shadow's body locked in when he felt that uncommon feeling: fear. It was a gossip-able feat to scare Shadow the Hedgehog. He wasn't one to be easily scared. But this tiny girl terrified him like a child afraid of the monsters underneath his mattress. Monsters were imaginary, however. This wasn't his imagination, and oh how he wished it was, or even greater wished she was some kind of foe he could remove at the chop of his hand.

Amy reached for his dangling fingers, but he tugged them away and clenched them into a fist that shook like a volcano on the edge of eruption.

She looked him deep in the eyes, the mouth, the face, the countenance, and its rugged elegance, and then admitted in a slightly offended way, "I'm not going to hurt you, Shadow."

It was weird, but seeing that uncertainty in him made me feel...powerful, kinda. It made me warm, warmer than I've ever been, and so much warmer than when I was around Sonic, because I had power over the Ultimate Lifeform. I feel dominant, hence you forget about how I'm the one having to strain my neck back to look up at him. I'm in control of everything involving him right now and I know it.

It was really..._really _strange, and I wanted to feed off that advantage more than I already was. I know that sounds sick and icky, but that's how I feel, you see! I'm also noticing this look he keeps giving me. It's like this afraid sort of look, the one where he keeps glancing me up and down, looking from here to there, and then lastly to me-almost as if he felt threatened.

Shadow...I'm not _threatening _you.

I felt myself move closer and him move further away - two steps more, two steps back―for Chaos's sake, stop moving! "I promise…" Am I begging? "I promise I won't hurt you...I won't, honest." I can see my hands begging for him to come closer. "That's the last thing I..." Oh no, I'm slipping.

Way too much power. I feel hot. I feel headaches and stomach-aches. My face must be even hotter. I trail my fingers down the vein of his wrist, into his own fingers and lace them together, causing him twitch.

Shadow the Hedgehog, the Ultimate Lifeform, _twitched_.

My glove's hovering and shaking in front of him, but that soon blears into a blur of white as I look past my hand and into him. He's watching my hand. His eyes are zooming in and out. His mouth is dropping open. He looks so fascinated, so unsure, so endangered.

How could he think I'd ever mistreat him, or anything else for that matter? Does he think I don't have a heart, just because I have a short-fuse? Does he think I'm a whiny b-i-t-c-h?

The tears are getting in my way. Everything's going blurry. I blink to clear the blur so I can see him, at least! He's looking at me now. He looks...God, he looks _horrified._

Am I that ugly? Am I that scary?

My tear drops.

I want to yell at him and put on a tantrum and say I'd never do anything bad to him, but I can't even mouth it out! I can only cry silently like a ditzy, brainless girl who knows nothing and never knows anything. I step closer and closer and...hope curiosity doesn't kill the pink. He doesn't step back. Nuh-uh, he doesn't even move. I'm a little s-scared if he'll take this chance to hurt me, but I want to get closer.

I want him to understand me, and me to understand him. Let's exchange the experience and understand each other so we can make this distress a common-ground friendship. What's the harm in it? I just want to be your friend, Shadow! More than anything, I feel like we need this friendship. It's always been in me to help types like this.

But I don't get to say that, or even hold onto that thought, because right when his face rids of that endangered imperil, we heard an explosion! Th―The ground starts to shake...my feet are vibrating...and I'm...I'm losing balance―

I latch onto Shadow like I would do Sonie and shut my eyes tight, shrieking, "What's happening?"

I felt him push me off because I, in turn, did not want to let him go. I almost fought him for the sake.

No, I did fight him a way, because in the end of my constant squirming and snatching out of his grip to re-attach myself to him, he grabbed my wrist, appling pressure to the main-vein to make me stop, and wrenched me to his face to croak out, "Stay here."

"Are you crazy? I'm not gonna be left behind!" And stop gripping so hard!

"This is too dangerous for you."

"I can HELP! I'm not WORTHLESS!"

The fangs were drawn back over by his lips again, though I can still see one's small proturb through his lip. I look up at him, and to me, it's like his eyes were whispering, _"I did not say you were,"_in an aggressive, but caring octave that had been offended by my own assumption. He must've been thinking about Ark.

"...Amy Rose, I am not going to abandon you," he lowered his chin, and I gulped. H-He's looking at me so _hard_.

He's not gripping my wrist anymore, but my hand. Eh? But darn it, he's squeezing so hard that the blood is being sucked out of my knuckles. Lighten up!

"...Do you understand?"

Hmph! I wish he'd tell me why he looks so pained and pissed, when I'm the one with purpling fingertips! - But before I can tell him, he gives my hand a reassuring squeeze instead, and holds our gaze for seconds longer. His posture never changes; he never blinks, never stops frowning as he gazes into my eyes. He is, undoubtably, the worst case of trauma I've ever seen, and no one deserves to be left in this condition of emotional-torment, not even Egghead...not even Gerald...and certainly not you, Shadow.

He's seen so much blood, on his hands and on a twelve year old girl's body, that it's the color of his eyes, eyes that keep replaying tragic scenes on repeat, like a movie-recorder with all its film ripped out. I can see the whole castle wall and MOAT between him and the rest of the world. Now that I've met you, I can't just..._leave_ you like this. If you keep punishing yourself, you'll...oh, _no one _deserves that, absolutely no one.

I feel his breath on me, and it smells like a scented spice. His eyes look sad...just flakes and glimpses of it on his iris. Little, patterning memories that will never end.

I hear myself utter, "Shadow..." like a prayer ready to be floundered in tears, and see my hand tremble up to touch him.

I'm seeing and hearing myself, but I'm not feeling myself do these things. I feel like the audience watching a bad-drama romance in the chimena. The red that is his eyes flicker up a firestorm in them, and I flinch back, being scolded by their cold-blooded red to keep my distance. Teh. I won't be gotten rid of so easily, Ultimate Lifeform or not. You don't scare me, Shadow, because I'm finally seeing you for what you are.

This premature heroine's damsel in distress.

His gaze is diluted in bewilderment and the disbelief, melting into fear and warning like earlier. I...think he's stopped breathing. I think _we've_stopped breathing.

The second my fingers dab his cheek―ugh, it was just a _second_, not so much a touch!― a warm but blinding green light replaces skin and body.

Chaos-Control. He used Chaos Control to get away from me.

I stand here alone under the shade of the trees, by myself, where he abandoned me.

My stomach's aching again...

Or maybe that's my chest.

...Oooh, _BOYS_ I tell you!


	5. The Innocence of Ignorance

**Chapter: The Innocence of Ignorance**

* * *

The jungle smelt of smoke and a rotting corpse.

Standing before a ramshackle Workshop on fire, Shadow the Hedgehog nudged some burnt rubble with his foot. He was over-thinking the potentialities of what happened here. Arms crossed and attitude nasty, Shadow turned out to the black chasm in the ground.

It was the remains of an explosion that had left this hollow mouth in the Workshop's plateau, and was still smoking from the combustion of the damage, but whose bomb did this?

Shadow's fingers tapped on the bend of his elbow. His growl razed into a bray.

Had G.U.N's missiles targeted the wrong station in pursue of him? Or was this a decoy to lure him here?

Shadow's ears shot up at the hack of gags and groans coming from a direction he couldn't pinpoint. His conjectures about this being a trap at any rate were still on high admonition. He took his time to think; his eyebrows trading expressions and his mouth doing a series of aerobics in contemplation, but he later realized he recognized the voice. His eyes rekindled with passion. Shadow skated down the steep drop of the plateau and skidded to a stop at the bottom in a halt of flames right next to a particular, familiar...blue HEDGEHOG out cold.

"Well, well, if it isn't the notorious Sonic the Hedgehog," Shadow fleered, arms linking across a buffed-out chest to make himself look superior.

The blue hedgehog's eyelids were flutterring. When they'd awakened, the whites of his eyeballs were inflamed with retinal blood vessels and bulgy with yellow fluids sudded in pus. From his spiraled disadvantage on the ground, Sonic's sticky gaze climbed up the white-hover shoes, the red strokes streaking the black legs, the folded arms ringed in gold, black, and red, the white patch bibbed on all black, and, finally, the sinister smirk of Shadow the Hedgehog.

Sonic's face changed from fever, to shock, and then stayed to malevolence. The yellowy substance slimed on his corneas streamed like tears down the dirt powdered on his muzzle. Tears of venom is what Shadow compared them to.

"You...! You..." Sonic hoarsed his yell into a hissing growl, coughing up blood and wiping it along his mouth, "...you just DON'T know when to give up, do you?"

Shadow's expression went flat; he was unflattered and unimpressed. "What are you sniffling about, blue hedgehog? Are you disappointed that even with death, I never lose a fight? From your glory on the ground, one would know it seems you can not hold the same."

Setting jokes aside, Shadow was appalled and concerned with Sonic's appearance, and was theorizing whether or not a world-wide plague was decaying the hedgehog to bones and sickness.

"D-on't play that with me, Shadow!" There was an invisible pressure bearing down on Sonic's lungs, because Shadow picked up on how hard the teal hedgehog was squeezing his chest. Bleeding splits and scratches criss-crossed his forehead, but the gash holing his abdoemn was still fresh.

Shadow's lips tingled with the need to spit, but..."Who or what did this to you, Sonic?" He wasn't oblivious - what Sonic spoke with was heartbreak, not hate. Quite frankly, he was wondering if the hedgehog was going to cry. If he did, Shadow might've been more fearful of this than anything else.

Sonic finally held up, holding his torn arm with his free hand. His possessed green eyes were forever hooked on Shadow as they watered to tears. "...Why would you do this?" Sonic mumbled as his eyes became portals to the misery and heartache that had been turning him inside out. "I trusted you back on Ark..." - those very eyes flooded over with water, but not a single drop dripped; not yet. "...And when we all thought you died, I..." - Sonic pounded the Earth with his fist, abruptly converting back to the shady, rage-disoriented character he had been for months. "..._I _mourned for you!"

...Shadow gave Sonic the benefit of guilt that was webbed around confusion. He took in his words to the very heart, but only murmured the most appropriate question, "...I will ask you once again, who or what did this to you...?"

Sonic went on raging as the angry tears soon came rushing down like rivers, "This is your fault!" He pointed back to the destroyed highland. "You almost killed Tails! You talked about my termination, how you were going to enjoy killing me slowly by first making Tails suffer in front of my eyes while there was _nothing_...I could do!"

"_Silence_, Sonic," Shadow was tired of the accusations and Sonic's lack of ability to stay on topic so that the situation could be evaluated, "Jam some resemblance of _sense_into your brain and stop blaming your illusions on me. If I wanted to kill you, it would never be left half-finished with an, 'almost!'" - it hadn't meant to sound threatening, but supporting evidence for his character, and yet Sonic took it just as that.

The veins veining Sonic's forehead were worming and pulsing underneath the flesh like parasites. Sonic screamed out his battlecry and kicked off the ground to stand.

"Wait!" Amy squelched from where she stood and then broke out into a run down the pathway. "Don't fight! _Please!_"

Sonic didn't hear her acerbity, but he did glance at her. That satanic craze to his face that had also folded his upper lip back to flash the blood bleeding from his gums, suffocated her in her place. He looked...blind. Unable to recognize her, and a diseased animal ravaged in rabies. Sonic whipped his head away from Amy and bolted off to tackle Shadow head on.

Shadow withheld his arms in their egotistic posture, and, despite how uncaring and hateful his voice sounded, told Sonic out of sincere disappointment, "...You're going to waste what's left of you."

Sonic wasn't slowing down. His legs were blue blurs, his nostrils were fuming hot air, his back rows of teeth were sabers that seemed to grin, his eyebrows arched high enough for his eyeballs' pink corners to be seen, his quills were stiff and branched out, and he was consumed with the hunger to kill the artificial hedgehog.

"...So be it, blue hedgehog."

When Sonic came close enough, Shadow somer-saulted skywards with his arms still crossed. He balled into a spinning black and red weapon and pounded Sonic into the ground with his spines: the homing attack.

The confused hedgehog's body was slammed into the dust, but he steadied himself back up with the tears gushing unstoppably under his rage. Shadow landed behind the trembling 'hero' of Station Square and Space Colony Ark. Sonic spat and choked on the dust tightening his throat, but Shadow's heavy foot pinned him back down.

"Shadow, stop it!" Amy threw her hands up. She wasn't close enough just yet, not enough to be of some help, but her vocals were breaking syllable upon syllable. There was already mucus clogging up her throat from uprising sobs.

Shadow didn't change his intentions from what they were. He growled in his chest to persuade himself to ignore Amy's terrorized begs.

Shadow drove him down, burying him in the dust. "Just what did you expect to accomplish in your condition? If you know what's good for you, then you will stay down. _Listen_to me, or there will be no turning back."

The former words hit Sonic's flashbacks of earlier and enraged him to the climax of renewed strength. He spin dashed from underneath his opponent's foot and tried using a home attack on Shadow. The Ultimate Lifeform countered much harder as their spinning quills collided, and Sonic was thrown back from the impact. Sonic made a quick lurch to cut a jab at his enemy, but one attempt became many, and none of them made contact with Shadow's body. The black hedgehog dodged each uppercut, right-cross, and left-hook with arms still folded and his eyes still closed.

Shadow caught Sonic's arm and twisted it back to immobilize him where he stood. "Be still and stop worming like a child. My goal is to calm you down!"

Sonic's eyes burned with the tears. He swung his foot up Shadow's chin with one crack on his opponent's jaw, causing his black counterpart to release and stagger back. Amy muffled her sobs, tripping to a stop in her tracks. Shadow popped his jaw back into place with a grunt, and... _chuckled. _Blood ran down his lip dribble by dribble.

"...I see," He licked the runny fluids with the swirl of his tongue. "You have made your choice," he smudged the red along his mouth to flaunt a masochistic grin from behind his wrist. "...And you will soon see the _blood _of it."

The blue rushed the black as the black suited up to end the fight with one fatal blow.

"_STOP!_"

Before Shadow saw her coming, the pink heroine had knocked him out of bound and took his place in front of Sonic.

Shadow's face wrinkled up into sneering vehemence instead of shock. "What are you doing?"

Amy disregarded his speech and frowned down the barbaric hedgehog she had hoped would stop just for her.

Sonic steered to that stop and lazed his eyes over the pink blocking the black. Dizzily, he murmured, "...A...Amy?" His eyes opened up with more recognition. "..._Amy_..."

Amy wept, "Sonic, I know you're angry, but you have to stop fighting!"

Sonic's ears flung up as he continued staring.

"Shadow is not your enemy!" Amy's blubbering made its sobby emergence. "He just wanted to help at first!"

The dark hedgehog watched Amy, taken aback, but angry. She was defending him, and not even squalling over how he pulverized Sonic. What had gone wrong with her head?

"And _y-you!_" In the blink of an eye Amy Rose turned on Shadow the Hedgehog, and all suspicions of her behavior were soon flushed down the drain. "How could you attack Sonic when you know he's injured? How could you do something like that? ...H-How could you when I told you not to?"

A slap stung Shadow's face. It had come down on him hard and unforgiving enough to break his jaw with much more severity than Sonic's foot. His head snapped around to one side with the handprint smoldering on his skin. He stayed in the position she'd slapped him in, stunned and spaced eyes staring into oblivion as they began to cloud over.

Amy shut her eyes and gritted her teeth before lashing out at him again. Again and again and again, Amy beat red bruises and swollen dimples into both his cheeks with the palms of her hands, and not once did he stop her. She was choking, grunting and whimpering as she continued to slap him with her eyes closed, trying to provoke him to respond, trying to get him to feel her pain. When she finally stopped to pant and wail out her hiccupping sobs, Shadow rounded his head to her like that of a robot.

Amy regained her breath and lunged with most of her weight, but Shadow's hand caught her wrist. She gasped and hurried her fearful gaze up to him, one hand on his chest and the other in his captivity, searching and searching his eyes for his intentions. She found no emotion; just a blank glower. When she jerked to tug out of his imprisonment, Shadow's iron-fist didn't even lock tighter.

Amy's pink lips shuddered open. "...Shadow..." The tearlines welled in the corners of her mouth. "Why aren't you r-responding...? Wh-Why aren't you...? You're acting like M-Metal Sonic...!"

His eyes showed some life, but not enough soul. Amy weaved her fingers into his chest hair and clutched at him. She struggled to reach up to him on her toes even as she knew her knees were popping promises to give out. More and more life seeped into his eyes the more distance she violated. He squeezed her pulse, suddenly making her head feel faint. On her very toes, her legs buckled.

"What was in your mind?" Shadow yanked her back up by her wrist when her body began sagging down his as a result. "Did you think I would kill him?" He drew her face into his, causing her to shiver.

She was so flimsy under his touch. Breakable. Crushable. So mortal. So weak.

"You could break, Rose," Shadow breathed, his eyes slicing into hers to manipulate fear into her. "So what made you believe - that had you not been an exception - my hands wouldn't be able to?" Not a threat, a test of her sanity.

Amy kept her head tucked down as she sniveled with her wrist still up in the air before facing him with a brave glare. "Because you owe me your new life."

Shadow's pupils dilated by a fraction.

The anger in her voice went unrivaled as she shed her tears, "And b-between the two of us, I actually believe you're _good_!"

With enraged disbelief, Shadow's fingers loosened around her twig of a wrist...

_'Ignorant child..._'

- THUMP -

He jerked his head up and looked past Amy's headband as she gulped and gasped, snatching out of his grip. Sonic was on the ground, tangled in arms, legs and drowning in blood; no longer breathing...

***~*~*Unknown Location*~*~***

Twin oval reds stared from a shady corner.

"Now, it's time_t-t-t-t-time_to play_your role, Shadow," the robotic speech pattern skipped and stammered like a broken recorder. "Just like you did Sonic. But that girl_girl_girl. She is_like a system overload_for_you, an emotional-trigger that frenzies your_common sense and subconscious, incomparable to the fake memories of Maria that Gerald had added to his brain to control him." The darkness spoke, the twin reds being narrowed by a fraction. "That_is_alright. I shall use her too."

A pair of long ears readjusted to hear the door creak, and the light shed on the floor.

"What's the matter with you, eh? I told you to kill them both, not to toy with them!" Dr. Robotnik roared like a egg-shaped lion. "Now do the job _correctly_this time and-"

"You_want_your Chaos Emeralds. I_know_this_Lord Robotnik." His chin lowered from a horizon of the darkness, showing one side of his face behind the shadows' planes - a bronze cheek, half a smirk, and one sharp-angled eye with the color of blood for an iris pigmentation. "But try learning to master the key of patience, My_my_my_m-m-m-m-y_Lord."

With such a smart-mouth remark, three nerves strained the Doctor's forehead as he cried his authority and pointed exaggeratedly at his servant, "WHY you little...! And WHAT'S happened to your voice?"

Loud banging against the wall could be heard. The monotonic voice soon slicked into a smooth, velvety alteration, "...Forgive me. My head had underwent minor injuries in my battle with Sonic, so things inside it had been..._juggled _around, if you will. Sneaky little blue rat, isn't he?" The one viewable side of the hedgehog's mouth upturned into an innocent smile. "But M'Lord, you have too ill a temper. If you can control that temper of yours, your blood-pressure won't be at risk."

"How dare you back talk me! Don't forget I'm the one who knows the location of the emeralds and the scientist in charge here! I'm the one giving you a purpose!"

The vermillion-pigmented eyes went blank. He smiled again. "I'm sorry, Lord Robotnik. Please forgive me for being disrespectful." The smile vanished and his dark side took the forefront. "But don't punish my disgrace just yet. I've recreated some…preparations for my-our, next attempt."

Robotnik raised an eyebrow and stroked his mustache, clearing his throat and trying to act nonchalant, "...Go on."

"_Yes_well, I can't give up my secrets just yet. Some things will have to be removed. First removal: Shadow. He must be destroyed for my preparations to stay the way I want them."

"No, I'd want Sonic and the fox boy removed first. Those two irritants are FIRST on the list of getting in my WAY!"

"You're not listening, Lord Robotnik. I didn't say Shadow had to be destroyed because he'll be our blockage. I just need him dead so my purpose, can _serve_, and our plan, can _work._"

Robotnik bashed his fist on the metal desk. "Now Listen to me, you ungrateful little rut! If you're not going to obey me then you might as well abandon addressing me as 'Lord Robotnik'! You do as I say, and do away with Sonic and the fox, first! Have I made myself CLEAR?"

A hellish perversion was in the figure's grin as he stared at his "master" long and hard. "…Yes, Lord Robotnik." He bowed.

Robotnik crossed his arms behind his back, rocking up on his toes. "Good, I'm glad we have that sorted. Now, I want you to come back with their heads this time for proof you did the job CORRECTLY!" He marched onward to the laboratory for his newest invention of world destruction and conquest.

Once the metal door shut and the egg-head was out of sight, the darkness whispered to himself, "How original of the situation...the servant to be manipulating the master," He juggled his red Chaos Emerald. "Then I suppose it serves well that the Doctor's mind is too unoriginal to catch on."

Clashes would soon clash at Amy's apartment, however -

_"Sonic…wake up!"_the blue hedgehog could hear it chanting his name. Why's everything so dark?

_"Sonic?"_It was sweet. Ever, ever so sweet.

_"Sonic!"_Just like Amy's…gentle and kind.

_"WAKE UP YOU, JEEEERK!"_

Sonic shot up like a poptart, his eyes wider than the Southern-White Faced Scops Owl's, and at the same time holding a pillow hostage to his chest as if it would deflect some kind of attack. Still and all, those paranoid eyes of his were clear and not sickly.

After plenty of frantic searching, Sonic found Amy's saddened and angered face shoved into his.

He tried nursing his pounding head, but his arm popped in the act and thereupon he discovered it was bandaged up, as was most of his body. Inspecting the room calmer than earlier, he snapped his fingers when it dawned on him that he was in Amy's apartment, on her sofa, handicap.

So then, where...?

"…Where's…where's Tails…?" Sonic blinked his eyes back around to Amy, itching across his bandages. He wasn't used to these things.

Amy set her First Aid Kit on the coffee table, mumbling without meeting his childlike face, "…He's in the guestroom resting."

As Amy was talking, Sonic wandered his fascination over the apartment he'd never been in before.

As Amy was clamping her kit's locks, Sonic was complimenting her un-pink taste in furniture.

As Amy was walking up to him, Sonic caught sight of the black sitting by the window in the background of purple and beige walls.

As Amy kneeled in front of him with alcohol dabbled on cotton, Sonic's ears began to flatten and his teeth began to threaten Shadow the Hedgehog.

Shadow felt the unsaid hostility scalding holes in his fur from Sonic's glare. His eyes went tight with a hiss, although he kept his attention solemnized on the window, "I did nothing."

Sonic rocketed up from the couch, almost hitting Amy in the chin with his knee when he did, "Stop hiding behind your lies, you TRATIOR!"

Shadow smirked, never finding Sonic a threat, but a...'chew toy'. "Is that the best argument you can stammer up? Go on blue hedgehog, blame your lies on me like you mean it."

"I'M not the LIAR here!" Sonic's leg bumped the chair and he crashed side-ways into it. He was having more trouble than he needed at the moment to just stand up by using the chair's shoulders. "D...D-Damn it..."

"That's enough, _both_of you!" Amy helped Sonic to his feet.

Her hands were on his belly and spine with the love and worry on her face saying it all. His hand was on her shoulder so he could lean all the weight of his side against her breasts, and Shadow homed in on these gapless skin-to-skin contacts like a sniper ready to blast the phalanges off Sonic's palm one by one, by _one_, by **_one_**/i, by **one.**

"Ames," Sonic frowned down on Amy's pink head, "I know you tend to see the best in everyone, but he was seconds away from putting Tails AND me down! He wasn't fighting me, he wasn't trying to slaughter me! And if you were _there_...if you _saw_ what he had done to Tails, y-you..." He forced the fire-burning tears back by screwing his eyes shut and bearing through his teeth, "How can I forgive anyone who would put him through that? I _can't_, Ames...! Not this time! I _can't_!"

"You're wrong!" She said in a rocky defiance, almost shoving Sonic into the chair. "You can't see the good in Shadow anymore because you can't even find the good in yourself anymore! You used to _believe_in him! But how can you do that when you stopped believing in yourself, when you stopped believing in me?" She sobbed. "Why can't you be Sonic again?"

Shadow blinked, but not at her, at the wall in front of him, so he could suck in his shock at her taking up for him again _and_her speech on Sonic's old faith. He was readying himself to turn his head and linger his eyes on them both, but then paused in mid-rotation and froze those eyes on the chair's leg.

...Hmph. Amy Rose would defend anyone she believed needed defense, and he and Sonic had only allied for a short while on ARK.

Amy's heart was too ignorant and too big, Shadow convinced himself as he snorted and closed his eyes in contempt, sluing his head the opposite way. Wasting her life energy on concerning herself with neither of them was as far-fetched and ambitious as ridicule could get, for Shadow could not be helped, and Sonic could not be persuaded.

"Damn it, Amy!"

Shadow's head swung around to Sonic at his vulgarity, having bitten his own tongue from the murderous outrage fired in him all of the sudden.

"You can't be so naive, and I've learned this the hard way! He-"

"He. Did. NOT!" Amy hollered, making Sonic and Shadow cringe together. Again, her sobs brayed with the screams, "Shadow wouldn't try to outright murder you, Sonic! Not after what happened on Ark! You KNOW that! You know you two have a deeper respect for each other than that! Than this! So why are YOU being so naive? Why don't you trust anyone anymore, like you've turned your back on the entire world? If it hadn't been for Shadow, Earth would've been gone!"

...Those were Sonic's words from the past, and for him, it hit where it hurt.

Sonic's throat closed; he was giving into the truth and his past feelings for Shadow's alleged 'death'. "Amy...th...that was a long time ago...o-okay?" His throat unclenched; he was rejecting the truth and his past feelings for Shadow's alleged 'death', "That was a long time AGO-"

"Quiet."

Amy and Sonic's bug-eyed stares ran over to Shadow.

The accused artificiality was on his feet with his hands balled and knuckles strained.

Shadow's frown pressed down on his black forehead, crowning him as the hedgehog with the most prestige in the room, "It doesn't matter how long ago it was," his throaty growl curdled Amy's blood to soot, and his heavy voice put Sonic in check, "Or the past time-plane that it was in."

Amy downturned her gaze to Shadow's hands, which were loosening up.

"What matters is _this_ time-plane, and _this _pathetic Faker's ocular fallacy," Shadow called out Sonic with his finger.

Sonic went into battle position, "What the heck does that mean anyway?"

"I never touched you or your fox friend," Shadow let down his finger and set the hand on his hip, acting smug, but annoyed. "Claws were responsible for your lacerations and contusions, and if you've acknowledged, I do NOT use my 'fingernails' to fight my enemies. I was with Amy before that explosion even happened." Shadow nodded at Amy for her vouch.

"I know what I saw!" Sonic waved his knuckles. "I was the victim! It was a black hedgehog with the same looks! Who other than Shadow the hedgehog! Who else do we know that has the same description as you? The same bloodstained eyes that fuel with hatred for all living things…"

"I must say, Sonic, you and Rose have a talent for poetry," Shadow smirked. It was true that Shadow loathed all living things, but if the "Faker" was going to insist on crying 'victim' then Shadow might as well give him a trophy in blood.

"I MOURNED for you, Shadow...! And this is how you say your 'thanks', old pal, old BUDDY? How about I show you some MANNERS?" Sonic launched to make his enemy eat his words despite the odds.

Amy snagged Sonic's forearm, making them both fly backwards, "Shadow isn't a liar or a murderer as much as you are in no condition to be f-fighting, Sonic the Hedgehog!"

Sonic wailed at her instead of yelling, "Did you forget what he did back on Space Colony Ark?" He shoved her hands off.

"And did you forget what you said to me back at the Mystic Ruins?"

An awkward silence...

Sonic and Amy's ears creased back, while Shadow's propped up.

"...Amy, it wasn't like that," Sonic whispered off to the side. "I wasn't..." - he gulped - "...trying to isolate myself from you on purpose."

"I know the story, Sonic! And I am not m-ad at you because you yelled at me in Mystic Ruins! But right now...what you're doing right _n-now_..." Amy's bottom lip curled back and her chin dimpled; she was trying to keep in the teary disgust. "_Sonic_ wouldn't do this. Your entire personality had changed, all because you were grieving over Shadow's death and the entire city's neglect of him, for a whole..._fucking_year," She thrashed at the air with her hand to emphasize her outrage.

At this waist-deep rise in their conversation, Shadow was indeed staring.

Sonic outheld his hands for her pity, "A...Ames...come on, don't do this..." He grinned it off, desperate as can be. "...Come on, you wouldn't d-do this, Ames. D-Don't back away from me..."

She was the last person he foresaw that would back away from him. If the world was against him, wanted his head on a pitchfork or wanted to hack off his legs and quills to be on some sick display, he knew for years Amy would defend and be there for him, but now she's against him.

"You shut out again, and you're _straining_ to believe your voice, when you know Shadow didn't barge in and randomly attack you! _I_ can hear it, Sonic!" Amy beat on her chest twice with a fist. "_I_ can _hear_ it. You can't keep hurting yourself and _everyone_ else just because of your instabilities..." The tears tickled down Amy's smiling lips. With her lecture, her breath was drying up, and she had nearly panted in anxiety and terror of her own conclusion, "...You can _never _be our Sonic again...!"

Shadow closed his eyes, before cutting them over to Sonic.

"Amy," Sonic advanced on her, his tail tucked somewhere between his legs and his ears down low, practically whimpering whatever it took to keep her on his side, " You don't get it-"

But Amy ignored him and finished her original sentence, "-Not until you acknowledge everyone around you..." Amy sobbed harder, face in hands. "Because it's not just about me anymore! It's about Tails, Cream, Knuckles...e-everyone! People have to experience a crisis in life before they can truly understand the meaning of it! And this is a fight y-you...have to overcome on your own, but don't shut us out either!"

Shadow's eyebrows raised up high at Amy; he was..._impressed._Not by her yelling, but by the fact that she'd acknowledged the situation and faced it, even taking his words and repeating them. Before, she couldn't face it.

Sonic's jaw unlocked and his eyebrows locked up, but whatever he had to say flew right out the window. He staggered where he stood from his physical weakness, making even weaker and desperate gestures with his hands, his mouth meanwhile aquiver with unsaid excuses and counterbacks and his pupils panicking all around.

Had he really been this lost and naive and _distant_ and _stupid_, all this time? Had he really been caving into something else? Had he really believed his shoulder-devil, when his entire heart was screaming, _"This isn't you, this isn't Shadow!"_as the 'Shadow' he had encountered in Tails' Workshop beat the pulp out of him?

Chewing her lip bloodily, Amy rejected Sonic's gaze when he looked up to her with a near sob, "..._Amy_..."

She squinted out her furious tears to the wall as her nostrils fumed.

It was final.

Sonic dragged his horror over to Shadow. He shook his head in pledge for a silent apology, "Shadow...!" - but Shadow mimicked Amy and also turned the other cheek. He was too repulsed and sickened to even belittle and bench Sonic thanks to the new information brought to the forefront.

...Sonic backed away from them both. He nodded and swallowed painfully, before peeling off his bandages and turned his palm over, letting them slither off and pile on the floor.

With one last glance back to Amy Rose and Shadow the Hedgehog, he stormed out of the apartment, never to make his face known again. Right after the door slammed shut, Amy gasped and ran to her window to watch the blue hedgehog limp off down the avenues of Station Square.

Her eyes drowned up in saltwater again, "_Oh_, my Sonic..."

She threw her body past Shadow - her tears grazing his cheek in cool wisps - and into her bedroom, locking her door right after. Shadow's attention jumped from Amy's bedroom to the framed photograph of her and Sonic on the living room table. His reflection shone on the glass as he walked up to it. Lifting an unsure hand from his thigh, he lowered the picture onto its face on Amy's behalf. Amy Rose broke down behind the bedroom door's wood, and didn't stop crying. He imagined her sagging down her bedside, slumping down to her knees and twisting the sheets in her harmless little fists as she nuzzled her slobbers into the mattress.

Shadow closed his eyes to block out the pity overlapping him in hopes of muting those bemoaning weeps of hers. He flinched every time she 'hic'-ed, and felt his stomach sink every time her sputters became chokes. His ears flattened back for even daring himself to disrespect and neglect Amy's suffering. She was not some stranger who was too pink for his eyesight and too much of an over-charged battery with energy and spunk to be tolerable, after all. Their short, but mutual bond on ARK was the crucial warmth of their history together. Or was Shadow the Hedgehog just taking sides and being ridiculously bias and confute to his relationship with Sonic, because he was addictively drugged by the light that haloed the pink hedgehog, and how her light had been the only light, ever since Maria's, that he was inwardly drawn to like a moth, despite his outward efforts not to be...?

_'No,' _Shadow adjusted the skirts of his gloves.

Both bright-colored hedgehogs, to him, were superficial by nature. Though Amy, by nature, was the more naive, the more unimpeachable, the ignoramus of bliss, the untouchable virgin to the knowledge of the real world, and much more..._tolerable_than Sonic to him. Somehow though, he could not imagine his life being without the company of either hedgehogs, whether unwanted or not.

In a second he didn't remember passing, Shadow was standing at the pink hedgehog's bedroom door.

In a flash he didn't remember flashing, Shadow's hand was reaching for the doorknob...

His heart punched his sternum. His blood pressure was rising. His body was hot and cold. He wanted to hurl.

The heads of his fingers brushed the lukewarm doorknob from the past-tense warmth of Amy's hand, but then Shadow stopped when he heard mumbling.

"Sonic's wrong..." It was smothered, maybe behind hands or a pillow, but he could very well distinguish Amy's voice. "...And he knows he's wrong. He's become his own enemy, and he's not even willing to fight!"

Shadow was dumbstruck. He figured she'd be bawling her eyes out about this ruining her chances of ever marrying the slow-minded and quick-footed hedgehog because of how hard she was on him.

"...I only yelled because I wanted to help him. Oh, oh he needed it so badly...just like when he yelled at me," Amy summed up. Her shuddery tone of voice stabilized. "Because he was right." It was growing soggy again. "...What would my future be, if I was still chasing Sonic then? What would my purpose be? I don't want to not ever see Sonic again, and he will come back, he always does...but the world's not made of butterflies and smiles...and that's what I'm supposed to recognize out of all this...right? That's the reason behind Shadow's life chancing upon mine...upon _all_ of our lives. Sonic and me the most, out of everyone. Shadow is our reality-check...but reality's so _painful_..."

Shadow nodded up and down in agreement, but then paused, and started shaking his head from right to left in fret.

Amy Rose was right about realizing her obsessive chase for Sonic was a waste of a lifetime and the wrongest of approaches to pursuing romance, but it shunned him to imagine her without her unrealistic simplicity, her way of thinking that had no sense of reality. If that innocent ignorance had been matured, then the glow she skipped and bounced with as she sang songs of sweet passion in the middle of nowhere, would evaporate. The otherwordly, almost _artificial_ glow that melted around her body would drip off her kiss-curled quills like liquid-silver and dissolve into the ground she walked on. It would soil into the Earth, and not into her soul. That glow - that _light_- was always all over her, for Chaos' sake; her hair was wet with it, glossy with it, it was in her teeth when she smiled, it reflected off her emeralds in solar beams, and gleamed off her bracelets in spectrums.

...What made her _glow_, for the last god-damned time?

Shadow's sweat was drying musk into the fur that was standing on end.

His thinking was fuzzy but fixed, and suddenly he convulsed where he stood in this urge to the rashest of actions and burst through the door, press his thumbs into her shoulders and shake her madly, threaten her not to change, not to let that damn ignorance of hers to evaporate. Her light is what protected her from being contaminated and traumatized by all the world's calamity, so if that shield was let down, then...

She'd become just like Sonic.

Their experience with Shadow, as he here and now realized, had tainted Sonic to the heaviest of extremities. None of them could endure what the black hedgehog had in a lifetime. None of them had been exposed to that apex of despair and loss, and the toxins in that exposure was emotionally devastating. Though, perhaps Sonic's mind's breathing pattern had been suffocated and fractured because he was the only one to witness 'death' before his very eyes - which was Shadow. Sonic, out of them all, experienced Shadow's despair. Whatever the cause of the effect, Sonic had been poisoned the most. This poison was spreading down the rainbow Sonic and his friends had lived on, and the pot of gold to their 'shiny world' had turned to soot and coal. The skin Sonic wore was decaying into crusty mold, and it was contagiously infecting everyone he once accompanied - Tails, and now the soon-to-be Amy.

Was Amy's light... - Shadow's pupil dilated - ...dying?

No... - Shadow's pupil resized to normalcy - ...of course not.

She was the pink hedgehog whose mind thrived off of imaginary lands where hope, love and faith held hands in one big circle, after all. She had her own buoyancy. So, it took everything within his will to back away from the door and walk back into the living room to recollect pieces of his common sense.

He decided to lose himself in the drizzles of rain outside the window and watch it mist the glass as he were to whisper among himself, "...Another storm."

Amy opened her door after ten minutes of hiding and Shadow's ten minutes of brooding. Shadow considered her through the side of his eye as she peeked from behind the door like a child. She had changed into a matching pair of red pajamas and pink slippers. It was the kind of outfit parents would find in the children's isle.

He smirked; she wasn't going to lose that childish nature of hers anytime soon.

Amy hesitated into the living room, still sniffling and carrying on. Her muzzle was tearstained, but she looked sober. When Shadow redirected his eyes to the window's mirror, he took note of Amy's pink and red reflection standing beside him in it. She didn't cheep, squeak, or pick out a topic for conversation. She just played at the end of her pajama blouse, sniffled, and shifted from foot to foot a bit. He did not hallucinate her as Maria accompanying him in the window when they'd look down on Earth together, exchanging theories, dreams and ideas in his past life. All he saw was Amy. Sensitive, untouchable, and hopeless Amy. Amy Rose was her own kind of creation who was still in the workshops.

"Um…" She snorted up mucus. "Tails is sleeping in my guestroom tonight, and..." He saw her eyes glimpse up at him from the corners of her eyelashes but later flit back down in insecurity. She may think he didn't see, but he saw alright. "...and the sofa's too small."

She went on eyeing him many glances in a row, most likely because he had angled his head to her and all of his attention, which she wasn't used to.

"...So you can sleep in my room," Her cheeks reddened; perfect against her fur and her bed-uniform. "O-on the floor of course...with a sleeping bag."

The older hedgehog's exotic features were still complimented by his trademark look.

When her nerves had been worked to their last by the weight of his stare, Shadow dropped in closer to her cheek, breathing on it to confirm what had been niggling in the back of his mind: "You...attempt to change yourself."

Amy gasped and flinched away from him, her scared face calculating him and her huddled shoulder protecting her cheek, "...What are you talking about?" He didn't sound like he was asking it, but stating it.

Shadow's tonelessness didn't match the situation he had violated, "Attempt to change what does not benefit your lifestyle," - he was another breath's distance away as he pierced her with the strict narrowing of the eyes - "Do not attempt to change _yourself._"

For a trice, his attention flew up to her bangs, which were uncombed and bushy but, more irritably, making it impossible for him to sadistically relish in the nervous light her green eyes should be saturated with. He didn't growl his resentment at the mop of hair hiding his emeralds from him. He took action. Rather than stroking the hair with the back of his hand, Shadow concentrated on picking and flicking each pink strand out of her face as if he were working on a highly radioactive experiment that had to be treated with special care. Soon, the shriveled pupils that pulsed with the seaweed green were peeking out from behind the bangs, and after, were exposed and vulnerable to him at last. Shadow held back the strand that kept falling into her emeralds and inched a millimeter closer to consume and crush any spark of bravery left in Amy Rose.

Amy's knees were knocking; mission accomplished.

Shadow inhaled the air she exhaled, and breathed out a husky, but affection-lacking murmur, "Who you are is what separates you from all the morbid energy that still halos Planet Earth, because nothing has changed or shown to be beneficial for me since the last time I eliminated this planet's doom, and what should not change is Amy Rose. At least, not what you were originally, from birth, made of. The planet needs more examples of morality and that...ignorant innocence you strut with so 'nobly.' If everyone were that way, I'd be..." he looked for the words. "...more, _satisfied_ to have saved this planet's species." _'Because this planet's world needs more light.'_

He closed his eyes and leaned back into his own space.

As he made his proud stride for her bedroom, a proud smirk took over Shadow's upside-down smile in the making, "And do not feel fret or anguish as though you have wronged Sonic the Hedgehog. He will eventually come back to his diginity - or shall I say cockiness - and eventually, will come back to you. You have saved him...from himself." Shadow's gaze reached the ceiling as his eyelids fell into thought with the deepening of his frown. '...As you have done me, so long ago on Space Colony Ark.'

Amy was left blinking, patting her heart's heartbeats and wringing out the bottom of her blouse. She reminisced on how his back had looked when he took his leave, how he strutted with dignity and accomplishment, owning the floor he walked on...

...He appeared to be glowing.

She cupped her cheeks.

Oh dear Gods, and _those _were glowing too!

***~*~*Mystic Ruins*~*~***

A black hedgehog ripped through the jungle at hypersonic speed. The familiar cerise stripes streaked the star-shaped quills, and the graceful rhythm for skating on air had been copied by another. He arrived at the Workshop's destroyed field, craning his head to sniff out his options, the heavy scalp of quills wavering in the gust. He lowered down onto one knee and dragged his fingers down the puddle of dried blood in the grass, rubbing it between his fingers. His glare came down on his blooded glove, his fingertips soon shaking and his eyebrows twitching out of their composure.

The wind-rider banged his fist on the ground and raged, "Where..._is_he?"

He tore a palm tree out of the Earth with both hands, hurtling it at the train station nearby in a ferocious cry. The tree speared right through the moving train's windows and shattered the glass into sugar crystals. It wasn't long till the screeching wheels of the train were overwrought by the screaming of the women and children until all of it was overwrought by a massive explosion once the nose of the train had hit the tunnel at the wrong angle. The fire ate holes into the parents' clothes, grown men cried and howled, children's bodies burned into ash that flew up into the sky.

The panting hedgehog watched clouds and clouds of multiple explosions explode down the train's rows, until the entire railroad blew up into a fireworks show.

Explorers down below held their faces and their mouths, sobbed and shouted at the accident above. Some ducked from the flaming scraps of metal, dismembered arms and hailing legs that rained from the sky in meteors. Others, however, threw their fingers at the hedgehog on the plateau.

The heat of the tragic disaster searing against his face like hellfire, the ink-black hedgehog's eyes doubled wider in thought.

Station...?

Station..._Square._

Station Square!

"Hmm," He drummed his fingers on his chin, uncaring for the havoc he committed. "Station Square~." His grin curled into a chuckling, light smile as he clicked his tongue. "I know where you've hidden, Shadow~."

The black hedgehog lifted the Chaos Emerald to the sky above as the swirling tornados of clouds and the inferno from the crash around him made a ceremony of it.

"Chaos..._Control!_" He disappeared in a red spark of light, but his laughter left its echoes on the canyons.

Thunder rolled, and the floods of rain began washing out the flames, but could not bring back the lives of the innocent on the train tracks.


	6. Sensational Revelations

**Chapter: Sensational Revelations**

_

* * *

_

Scratchy scribbling on paper.

The noise was making Shadow's ears winch for a whole hour. Behind the relaxed lips, his back-fangs were sanding down on each other as he tried to use mind control to make that _pencil_ break.

Stretched across the bed on her stomach, Amy was scribble-scrabbling in a hand-diary frilled in hot-pink streamers. The artificial hedgehog quietly seething in his irritancy was sitting on the sleeping bag she'd laid out for him. His head was facing the window, but he was really monitoring every move she made from the corner-view of his eye, or more so, watching the lead of that damn pencil. His partial-attention target would smile and giggle in her hand, changing his full attention to just what exactly she was sneaking into that handbook of hers.

Was she writing about him, maybe? And in that order, laughing at or about him too?

Shadow held in his growl; his white chest hair flaring out as a result, and then upturned his eyes to the window.

Rain...

Pints and quarts and gills and gallons of rain. It would be more or less raining like it did yesterday--the day when the jungle's green was the only beautiful view, and not the black mountains of city lights.

Shadow slighted his eyes as the siren of police cars somewhere near the apartment brought him back to Sonic's prosecution of another black hedgehog.

Although the United States, the military, and Amy herself have made it crystal that they were colorblind hallucinators, Sonic's eyesight was usually fine. The hedgehog was slaphappy and airy in the head, but he was coherent, so why had Sonic hallucinated him? If there was some unidentified hedgehog skating around in Shadow's persona, then its purpose was more than deadly. This mystery hog could reveal in the worst grand opening possible to the public that he's alive and give way to city-wreckage and mass panic in his name.

Shadow's lips smiled back from his teeth in a snaggletoothed grin, _'This is starting to sound reversed...'_

Amy clapped her diary shut. Not closed, but shut, hard and loud enough to make any normal bystander jump, adjust their glasses and blink at her clear demand for attention. To her disgrace, Shadow the Hedgehog wasn't a normal bystander by any standards. Amy pinched her lips together when he didn't even regard her with a glimpse. She stopped herself from chucking the diary at his big head when she noticed that, by the look in his eyes, he was in deep thought.

_'But what about?'_ She held her finger to her lip.

She cleared her throat, hoping he'd look at her, but his ear didn't even flick. She cleared it louder, but strained her throat so much she had to pound the coughs and hacks out of her. Somewhere along her choking, Shadow spoke, however did not look at her.

"What is it?" Not harsh, but not an invitation that he really cared either.

Amy gave out her last cough and harrumphed, "Wha...what were you thinking about?"

"Thoughts are fabricated in the private mind for a _reason_." Ooh, _harsh._

Shadow flicked lent off the pair of gloves she'd sewn for him an hour ago. He wasn't ungrateful for that gesture. Matter of fact, he had thanked her. No matter who he was or what happened to him, he had some manners for all women. Women who gave them back, anyway.

Amy raised her voice over his, "You looked worried and angry, so sue me for making that my 'concernment'."

He didn't back-talk her. He tightened his lips up more, closed his eyes, and slewed his head away, "Go to sleep. It's late."

"...You should really try looking at someone when you're talking to them." Amy rested her chin in her palm in defeat, "You should also work on expressing your thoughts and feelings with others. You'd be happier and feel as light as a feather once that deadweight's dropped."

Shadow eventually murmured, "Not all of us can be Amy Rose."

It was out of jealousy mingled with admiration, not dissing. Though Shadow being Shadow, no one would ever tell the difference - his voice seemed to have only one tone.

"Don't be like that," Amy honestly couldn't differentiate whether she sounded convincing or not; she felt charmed and uncharmed by his aloof and cynical attitude. "I mean you are one of us now, so it's okay if you share your concerns and yourself with us. We're not your enemies, we're not going to back-stab you with it."

His head snapped around to her so fast she had to eat her words back, "Whoever said I was a 'buddy' in that little 'Sonic Heroes gang'? Sonic himself made that _clear._"

Shadow didn't despise being a piece of her life, but being bunched in with the others was a life he'd never properly fit into. They were know-nothings who would never understand, know, and completely accept him or try to, but this girl seemed to have a sense of him. She seemed to accept him. Try to understand. Want to get to know. Want to be educated by him.

...It made him smirk.

After a few seconds of their staring contest - Amy sticking her tongue out and Shadow giving her a flat stare - Amy rolled her eyes, got off her bed and opened the curtains of her window. She headed back over, but this time to find a spot next to him.

Amy shared another hard staring contest with him sidewardly, before relaxing the muscles in her face once she looked outside, "Do you think it'll be a storm like the one before?"

Again, Shadow didn't reply. He was like sitting next to a rock. The moment Amy sighed and groaned however was the moment Shadow showed some life. He scooted away and laid on his side with a palm propping up his cheek.

"I'm not one of the local weather-reporters on your television's broadcast, so unfortunately you are asking the wrong person." His eyelids lifted just slightly so he could drown himself again in the rain rat-tat-tatting on the window.

Amy just sighed and chewed her hair wet and shifted her knees restless while crumpling her pajama pants in one fist.

"I'm _curious_ about something, Rose."

Amy jumped some and stole an awkward glance Shadow's way from over her sidelock, "Ah...okay. Shoot."

"Despite all Sonic's hint-offs that he will never slow down for you, why do you continue to chase him with such high optimism? Do you never break down?" His eyebrows arched as he derided her, "...Are you a masochist?"

Amy didn't get sassy or touchy about his choice of words. She just stared him down, eyes drawn in and face straight. Shadow's forked eyebrows arched higher, proving he was impatient.

"...Goals are goals, and he was a goal all the same," Her lips hardly moved, and she was glassy-eyed. "My goal kept me going. It kept me from thinking any bad thoughts, falling into depression, becoming a weaker person, or being manipulated by anything bad in general."

The look on Shadow's face could've passed for boredom and spurn, but in actuality, he was lingering on what she said.

Maria - she never set foot on the natural green grass of Planet Earth or the pavements on the cemented sidewalks, and no matter how pure she was, Shadow now feared that if she had stepped foot on neither, she would change. The world would beat it out of her. It was an outrage to even assume that, but it was at the back of his mind. Yet this pink girl - _she's_ stepped foot in all of it, perhaps even miles and miles of blood - he can't be sure - yet she's the same as she was the day before, the day before that, and the day when she bear-hugged him on Prison Island. So was Sonic the reason of her inhuman tolerance and force field against the world? Did he create this beguiling girl to be so invincible in a way she didn't even know?

"...And now?" Shadow pressed, mannerly at best. "Are you still adamant to renew your life goals? To make a New Year's Revolution? Because one day, this life goal will come to a close. Every story has a conclusion, and your journey will end. What will be your back up back-story then?"

Amy ran her hand through her hair and stroked some locks away, frowning at her scrawny legs,"Just because Sonic is revealing that he's not a perfect person or hero doesn't mean I'm going to stop caring about him."

Shadow's lids cracked open. "I asked you if you were going to pursue Sonic, not if you were going to stop caring about his welfare."

Amy was a little or a lot too quiet for him...for such a loud girl, anyway. She doubled up the sleeping bag under her.

"...I know Sonic isn't going to love me for everything I am, or accept all of my personality's coffee-stains," Amy swallowed the heart beating in her esophagus. "But I wanted to get married. I wanted to be loved. He seemed compatible...not perfect, but acceptable...and I've always wanted to be just like him. He's everything someone can look up too."

Shadow stared at her, doubting his ears; no, she was deadpan _serious. _Her simplicity was too much for his digestive tract to take; she was crazy. He tried to figure out the pink sitting crossways from him, and all he got was a migraine plus a queasy, weakening stomach. To her, education, money, a career, just weren't essential. The main value in her life was plain, clean, foolish, and unrealistic.

"You're young," Shadow was almost afraid to keep this conversation where it was, and his throat quivered out that distaste, "You have too many years ahead of you to be planning _weddings._"

"I know I should move onto a real life," Amy turned her body to him now, burdening big, emotional eyes on him. "But I want love in it too...it's the cleanest thing in the world. I want to feel that one day. I just want to experience that, that beautiful feeling. The world has all that to offer somewhere, I know it. I can feel it in my heart...right here..." She caressed her tremorous hands into her heart. "I need to be loved just like everybody else does."

Love was that simple to her. _Life_ was that easy to her.

Shadow ran his fingers over his face and held his forehead some before rubbing the back of his neck, his eyebrows wagging once in awkward disbelief as he squinted at the floor.

He had never met anyone like her, so desperate but bold enough to be open and blunt. He could not believe she existed, or was breathing the same oxygen as he. The ups and downs, rises and falls of her small, yet perky breasts cancelled out his suspicions. In spite of that, what was coming out of that trembling, soft---was it soft?---pink mouth of hers that was almost puckered into a pout, was unbelievable. Just like on ARK. The longer Amy Rose examined the look he was giving her, the more emotions he saw seep into her own.

"...I don't want to be alone in the future," Amy blubbered, the tears watering the natural green-blues of her eyes. "That's all. I'm so lonely already...I don't want to _die_alone..."

Shadow's eyebrow twitched up in attention and his mouth suddenly felt dry and stuck together in the corners. Had he met this girl in an alternate universe of fantasy island, he'd expect this, but he met her _here_, a girl whos been up and down the hills of _here_ and could never be broken. How can she have such hope, belief and faith in others so easily in general? What kind of life had he lived that made this girl look like an alien to him? Their planets were in two totally different galaxies.

"You have _friends_, Rose." Amy watched Shadow's mouth move - flashes of tongue and fangs between lips. Those lips quickly pulled back to snarl out clenched fangs. "How_could_ you be lonely?"

She forced a smile. Her eyes were sheen with tears like glass. She wondered if he was jealous, and if he wanted her world.

"Oh but," Amy waved it off, and laughed the fakest laugh he'd ever heard. "It's not the same. They don't _need_ me. But Sonic...I like thinking about Sonic and what...'will never be.' It's something to get up for in the morning. It's something to _smile_ about. It makes all that hurtful stuff go away. I can ignore it just like..." she snapped her fingers, "that!"

Shadow watched this pink girl, speechless, astounded, awed, disgusted, pitying, so many things...

"...M-Mmph," Amy held and hid her face from him, ashamed. "...I'm pathetic, aren't I?" She strained her laugh. "I'm pathetic and idealistic."

"...Yes," Shadow replied, his breath short of him and his confused sneer melting into a thoughtful frown. "But..." he turned back to the washed down window. "...It is understandable. Everyone has been pathetic at least once in their lifetime."

Hands cupping her cheeks, Amy slowly rolled her pink face up to Shadow, a tear dropping and 'pinging' off her bracelet.

"It is understandable why you'd want to evade loneliness..." The understanding in his tone of voice embittered back up into dispraise. "But it does not mean you have to delude yourself with these insecurities. Just because Sonic is a 'goal' that keeps you going, doesn't mean it's the right one that benefits you the way it should."

Amy's frown sunk in, "Who are you to tell me what is right and what's not?"

"Because you have so easily forgotten" - Shadow abruptly sprung up from where he laid and stuck his face in hers - "that I am the one more experienced. Recall back to my first appearance, Rose," his lips still downturned into a no-nonsense line and his eyes half-lidded in lazy seriousness; a face equaling a seduction Amy bit her lip for labeling it as such. "Do you remember my goal?"

Realizing this was her cue, she flinched and spun her finger around a thread on her pajama, "R-Revenge?"

"You are correct," Shadow's lids flattened lower above the red eyes that were currently running back and forth across her turquoise ones. "And that goal is what kept me going."

"...But that's not a good or right goal at all!"

Shadow's chin lowered down until it prompted on his feathery chest, "Then you have now contradicted yourself."

Sweat dripped off her chin. '_Why's he have to be so serious? Is he even breathing? Can he hear me panting? Would it kill him to BLINK?'_

Shadow searched her eyes for thirty seconds of hearing one another breathe, before he withdrew and he climbed to his feet to walk over to the window, "But the new goal, the one you..._reminded_ me of, was much more fulfilling and free-feeling than my original."

Amy's ear twitched before both spun their full attention around to him.

"For that," Shadow moved his head some; his chin and his mouth hidden somewhere behind his shoulder, but his eye piercing right through her, "...I do thank you."

As he looked back to the rain with his black back still staring at her, Amy reminisced on his melancholy on ARK.

"Your blissful ignorance is balanced between unbeneficial and beneficial. I see that now, but by making you see another light, I will be returning the favor."

"Shadow...?" There she did it again; said his name like it was...

Shadow looked at his shoulder, but not back at her. "...Yes?"

...It's the softest thing he's ever said to her.

A shy smile curled Amy's lips back as she hugged her diary, "I like to write a lot. "

Shadow's chin lifted higher.

Flicking her tongue against her bottom tooth, she awkwardly slid up behind him.

"...And I wrote a lot of things about you today," Amy dragged her eyes up and down his build.

His shoulders were always back, his back was always straight, confident and unafraid. She drew her attention back to her diary and fingered its bottom tab. Shadow's head turned another rotate, just enough for her to see the cheek of his muzzle and the red eyeliner arched in the corner of his eye, even though he was again looking forward and not at her.

"I wrote that I think of you as my friend," She leaned sideways to peek around his shoulder and see his face. "It's okay if you don't think that about me, you know!...But I'd still like to keep that thought, if that's okay with you?"

His ear simply warded off a fly, and she crossed her heart and swore to God he had moved his head another round to maybe even...look back at her.

She snorted a laughy sigh, now lowering her voice down to a shuddery whisper, "I wrote about how when your debt is over and done with, you'll say to yourself, 'Why did I waste my time with that silly girl?'"

Her body heat was standing just behind him, with her face hovering just over his shoulder, just a bit.

"I used to not think about you at all," She smiled her apologies, her chin perked on her diary, "You existed, but not in my thoughts. You weren't...much to me, just like how I was nothing to you."

"...You're wrong," Shadow, as bass-deep and soft-spoken as he could be, muttered for her sake without giving her his face, "That last encounter in our past has made you something to me. Not everything, anything, or nothing, but something. That encounter is solely impossible to ignore."

Amy stopped to edit the things she was going to say next, but smiled and grinned away at his considerate words. At least...she knew he could never deny her existence now. When his head turned further, until his lips, needle-nose and ruby eye could be in seeing range, she mustered up all her breath to speak, but nothing came out.

Instead, it was Shadow who spoke, "Although I've fulfilled Maria's wish, I don't feel rejuvenated. I feel like every puzzle piece has been blown out of proportion since that day."

Amy's ears drew to her head. He spoke like she wasn't there, or like he didn't mind her being there. Her heart had never beat so fast in happiness and so hard in sadness.

Lifting his hand to explore the lines in his palm, Shadow soon looked out to the sky, whispering a vibrative and sullen whisper, "Where do I go from here? Now that one purpose has been fulfilled, what new one is a...'child of science' supposed to live? ..._Why_ didn't my journey _end_ in space, if there is nothing else for me to do from here on?" his hand gripped into a fist. "...Just what in the hell am I?"

Amy swirled her toe in the carpet, "I think you're going through a phase. Kinda like how I was with Sonic."

Finally, he looked back at and for her with a suspicious twiddle of the ear waiting for her to elaborate.

Amy blinked up at him but then pretended to find interest in the carpet's curls, "You won't be lost like that forever. You were given a second chance because you needed and deserved it, maybe? All you had to go through...that you survived and stuff, rewarded you with a chance to live a better life now. You can be...whomever you _want_ at this point." She shrugged a shoulder. "You can pick anything you like. The present and the future are everything. It's like...it's like you're finally free! No orders, promises, or missions! You can make up your own...for, well...well for _you_, I guess. So you can't mope about it. You gotta make the best of it!"

Her systems went under 'intruder alert' when Shadow took one step toward her instead of away from her. Oh God, he looked _so_...so _passionate_. Not goo-goo eyed or amazed, just..._passionate_ and serious, with a passion that was hooded a bit, to keep his character intact.

"I-----I'm not saying you have to go out there and be like Sonic," She hugged her diary dearer, "saving people and saving the world and stuff like that, just be..._Shadow the Hedgehog_, instead of the Shadow the Ultimate Lifeform."

They both took time out to think to themselves.

"...And just who _is_, Shadow the Hedgehog?"Shadow sounded indirect and abstracted like he were talking more to himself than her, but his eyes were wide open doors longing to be filled with knowledge and a new soul by the way they looked at her.

Like a child. Just a bit.

Amy reveled in them for a while, having to open and close her mouth several times before her own voice managed to sigh through.

"...Sorry, Shadow," She trailed her eyes down to her feet, her chin tucked back into the top of the diary, "This is where I stop. You have to decide that for yourself, because Shadow the Hedgehog is whoever you want him to be."

For once, the silence between them right now was a lot...

_'...Nicer,'_ Amy's lips smiled against her diary as her eyes looked off.

"Hmpf," the mocking noise ruined her fuzziness.

"'Hmpf' _what_?" Amy pouted up at the black humanoid hedgehog.

She drew back however when she noticed his expression wasn't of mockery at all. It was awfully serious, but softer because it was somber.

"I was once convinced you were the noisiest, most insecure girl who was too far gone to be mentally salvaged that I ever met," His smirk was so small it was practically invisible.

Amy retorted back playfully but quietly, bashfully even, "...I used to think you were the creepiest hedgehog I ever met."

His eyebrows snapped up in humored sarcasm, "Should I be surprised?"

"Mm~," she lowered her gaze again and shook her head, pink hair flying in wisps, "Nah-ah, no really."

"Didn't think so."

"Guess you just have to look beyond the looking glass, huh?" Little giddy Amy couldn't help but bite the tip of her thumb to hold in her giggles at his small attempt to make a joke.

When she got the courage, she looked up, her shoulders hugged to her cheeks and her thumb still in between her smiling teeth.

"So~," Amy's eyes gestured to herself, "...What do you think now?"

"I think you're more aware of yourself and Sonic," He uncrossed his arms and let them hang. "And at this very moment, this is the quietest I've seen of you. It is unquestionably a change."

For some reason flustered despite how he said it like he would calmly say anything else, Amy dropped her diary. She kneeled over to pick up some fallen pages and tuck them back into the book.

"Um, yeah, I," she shut the personal trove and dusted it off. "I know almost for certain something's changing inside me. It's a weird feeling in my body," Her eyes grew distant as she stopped to relish in that weird feeling, "but I know it's..." a slow grin perked her cheeks up. "...happening."

As she stood up off the ground, she almost jumped out of her skin to see Shadow's face in hers.

"How does that feel?" His emotions drew into an eager glare she wasn't familiar with. "That type of change?"

The eagerness on his heat was close on her face. And his _eyes_...! They were all sorts of colors. Prisms and shades of orange ringed around fiber-looking mazes of ruddy copper. Bright and dark colors that had defined the one emotion he always felt were now painting a variety of emotions tonight. Still, none were loving, just greedy to hear her advice.

"....Re"-- Amy gulped on her spit -- "....junven...ating?"

Those vermillion eyes of his looked like they brightened, like all the lights in her bedroom were suddenly drawn into them to make them shimmer. He was almost too intense for her to take. With her neck strained up and his head tilted down, she could feel how powerful he was and how fragile she was.

He could break her.

And she'd break.

Just like he said.

"...You have everything I don't have, and feel everything I don't," He said it through his lips enviously, but not hatefully through his fangs like he had a habit of doing.

She leaned away, but the single readjustment made their noses brush. Her eyebrows curled back as she searched his face for some evidence of what he'd do next, what he'd say, if he was finally accepting her into his world, but he said the thing she least expected, and said it with a rumbly grumble:

"...I'm not _blind_ to the way you look at me," his eyebrows caved in, making his eyes look angular and wicked. "Little_girl_..."

Amy dug her fingers into the fuzz of her diary, trembling.

"Do you see me as him?" His glare was fire, but not rage.

"_No_," Amy's lip wrinkled up into a sneer. "I'm not colorblind or on natural LCD. I see you as Shadow the Hedgehog. That is who you are."

His eyelids sunk into his eyes as he watched her fingers come loose on her diary, "Shadow..._the Hedgehog._"

Amy's sneer sunk off her muzzle; he was going in and out again. Though when his eyes reeled back up to hers in their usual stoicism, she was back to square one of freezing up and sweating like a dog. She looked back down and avoided anymore eye contact. It was impossible to look down without seeing his hover-skates barely a step away from touching her open toes. She hadn't been looking for it, but she cocked her head left and right when she noticed the A.R.K. copyright symbol on the red rim of his shoes.

_'...ARK'--_And then the images flushed through her memories.

...If it hadn't been for her, Earth and herself would've been nothing but a figment in once upon a time. If it also hadn't been for her, Shadow would've never nearly died. And when he did 'die', she...never even shedded a tear. She just...felt bad for a few hours.

"...I...need to apologize for something," Amy breathed out, choking at the end of her sentence.

Her hands shook on her diary. She didn't want to look up and see his face. It would hurt a lot. Then he'd leave. Then she'd be here alone.

"When you supposedly...'died' Shadow, I..." The tears were back, but then were suddenly blinked off.

Why were there spritzes of windy rain wetting her face?

Amy looked up and--gasp! "He left!" The wide-open window and whirling curtains were enough proof. "Shadow?" Amy panicked, running to the ledge of the window and jerking half her body out of it. "Shadow!"

Her yells were being censored out by the thunder and her body was being drowned out in the downpour. She hooded her eyes with her hand, sneezing and coughing, frantic and frenetic. At last, she spotted a silhouette of black and red standing on the gargoyle of her apartment's roof facing the eye of the storm.

"Shadow!" She leaned out of the window further.

He was too far away for him hear; mentally and physically.

Oh, she'd get him to hear.

Amy climbed out of her window, one shaky leg at a time, and scaled the building's ledge with her body squished against the cold brick wall to prevent a nasty fall. The rain in her face and the wind at her ankles made it close to impossible, but she was too caught up on her desperation to think her fate through. When she peered down over her cheek however, the harsh grey reality and terror kicked in. Her death below her was the honking cars and shuffling people the size of ants. As her breath got caught on her spit, her foot slipped. She dug her nonexistent nails into the worn brick before she had the chance to be blown off the edge. Amy panted and whined while the small chunks of brick tumbled off the ledge and became smaller specks as they fell into the city's mouth below. The streets blurred in and out of focus like a poor-quality camera to where she grew nauseous from the motion sickness.

She squeezed to the wall and closed her eyes tightly against the rain and the tears as the wet wind licked her skin; she regretted coming out here, she regretted all of this, and, '_Wh-What the heck am I even doing out here in the first place?'_

"Do you have a death wish, Rose?"

Amy spun her head up from her shoulder and blinked past her tears and up into the heavy curtains of rainfall hitting her eyelids. The gargoyle was above her and her under it, and so was Shadow, who stood in his signature pose on its pitbull head as he watched over the city. His image reflected in her green eye. He was a dark superhero all of the sudden, _Batman_ maybe, both weak and strong, standing in the white face of the moon and lit thunder on the underbellies of the clouds.

Choking on the rainwater in gurgles from awing for so long, Amy gushed out, "Why'd you leave? I was talking and you...I was saying something important, and...!" more tears rippled just under her dilated eyes, "...Wh-why'd you leave?"

The edge of Shadow the Hedgehog's mouth twitched, "The other hedgehog Sonic mistook me for..." he tilted his chin up, looking beautiful and terrifying. "...is out there. I felt him not a moment ago."

The night air was cold and damp, but he could care less. The tickles felt good on his neckline and the white yoke of his eyes. It was rinsing him. It soaked his quills, making them droop and slack. His legs bent forward, preparing to abandon her.

'_No, don't leave me here by myself!'_ Amy's mouth gaped into a silent scream as she rushed out her hand although she couldn't touch him.

Tonight, she had no one. Sonic had been her everyone, but now he was probably more afraid of her than he ever was. Shadow's arms aligned in position to squat into high-jump.

Amy hobbled forward, pushing off the wall. "W-Wait just a SEC--"

Her heel scuffed the ledge. She sucked in her stomach. A breathless gasp was thrown up.

Slow motion.

_'Please...'_

Her foot was flying high in the air. The red veins stretched over her eyeball. Her heartbeat was the only pulse in the world.

_'...Someone...'_

...Ba-dump.

The ledge was leaving her. The sky, the clouds, the gargoyle, her window, the apartment building.

_'...Anyone...'_

Ba-dump.

The raindrops were racing down on her.

_'...Please...?'_

Her tears trailed up to the sky.

Ba-DUMP, Ba-DUMP.

_'Pl-Please!'_

Her eyes stung and burned and ached and hurt. Her voice was nothing but a hoarse gag.

Ba-DUMP, Ba-DUMP, Ba-DUMP.

_'H-HELP ME!'_

The streets and city below her were speeding toward her at a ferocious velocity.

BA-DUMP, BA-DUMP, BA-DUMP, BA-DUMP.

- And then something yanked her back.

B-BA-DUMP.

Her wrist throbbed with the pain of almost being torn off her limb. Then the world had gone completely green in a flash of green light, and her body felt like it had disappeared. Then her body came back to her, the wooziness and the gravity, and she felt a drenched, warm, and hairy body of someone else muffling her face. Her pants fell into the fur as she made small fists in it, slurping in slow breaths and trying to maintain her shaking.

...Ba-dump...

Amy's eyelid steadied back to open one eye halfway with the right side of her face still buried into the stranger's chest.

"...S...Sonic..." her voice watered.

It had to have been him. She snuggled her shoulders into her cheeks with a little '_mmph'_ under her breath. Her eye dimmed lower while her eyebrow pressed in harder.

"_Oh_ Sonic..."Amy sighed, lifting her arms up to hold him.

Before she could even have the chance, she was shoved back, and the tuff of soaked fur left her entirely. Stumbling until she caught her footing, Amy flunked her eyes open to be gawking at a pair that were as blood-red as Satan's skin in the darkness of the night. She cowered and back-stepped in horror. The lightning struck in and out, resting flashes of light on the red racing stripes and the black spikes forked out like a starfish.

Amy hiccupped a gasp, "...Shadow..."

He stood under the halo of white rain - black, red, hunched, trembling, chest heaving, nostrils panting, eyes huge, and pupils tiny.

Amy held her jaw to keep it from trembling like his body. "I..." her mouth quivered open as she sucked in her sobs, "...I'm sorry...!"

"_I_ am the one who saves you from your death, and you have..." Shadow's canines suddenly looked like sabers, and his eyes were more than volcanic, "...the _lunacy_ to call me after that _blue hedgehog_...!"

Amy was having a hard time controlling her heart from stopping, "I-I didn't....I..." she took a step back, another step back, and then another. "I'm _sorry_..."

Shadow's chin tilted up higher as rain rolled down the bowing length of his eyelashes, "And here you stand," he smirked, the raindrop leaping off the end of his eyelash, "..._cowering_ before your _savior_." Shadow's bitter, hateful chuckles made some unshed saltwater prickle at Amy's eyes.

She saw his back turn like she had again and again, and she lost it.

"WAIT!" Amy shook her head and cradled her hands into her chest, leaning into all her body weight. "Don't go! I don't wanna be completely alone! I'm more lonely than I've e-ever been...I'm s-_scared_...!"

Shadow ignored her and presented his Chaos Emerald to the thunderstorm, "_Chaos..._"

"PLEASE!" She stomped the ground.

Shadow's fangs strained together, "_CONTR_--...."

A small hand caught his wrist. _Two_, small hands. One pink, one gloved, both stopping the hand that was summoning Chaos Control. Shadow looked down his wrist and into the determination of Amy Rose. Her teeth were eating into her wobbly lip and her frown was almost crying to stay strong as she clung onto his wrist. Shadow's lips sagged down into a parted line.

The wind pasted drops of rain to Amy's bottom lip when she stopped biting it, where his attention was momentarily on. He saw her humanlike teeth and saliva-glistened tongue as she opened her mouth to say:

"With all that's going on, I couldn't help but think of Sonic being Sonic again, the Sonic who's always, _always_ there to save me...the Sonic I miss, before he became you after you...'died'! You had the same warmth his belly had when he held me bridal style...." Amy felt his arm jerk, but she jerked it back to her. "But you are _not_ a substitution! No one could ever be a substitution for the real thing. I just had a split second breakdown, you have to _understand_!"

She wasn't on her knees this time. She was demanding him to hear her. Shadow jerked again, _hard_, though only to let her know he didn't care to understand any longer.

"Shadow, I'm not stupid...!" She looked as deep as she could into eyes that didn't want look any deeper into hers. "I-I'm not, I..." the tears rushed up. "...I KNOW who you are," she looked up and down his face feverishly. "...You're not a robot, you're not a tool of destruction, you're not a holy saint, you're not Sonic, you're just...Shado--"

"Then _tell_ me, _Amy_," Shadow roared and snatched his entire arm out of her slippery fingers.

Amy's eyes cleared from their fever and shined with hope and fear of the hedgehog who was filling her world with black.

Shadow's face came closer and stopped a good distance from hers. "What is it that you _truly_ want from me, of all _sinners_as you Christians pet-name my 'tradegy'?"

His whisper was thin but rough, and humid but dizzying.

She reared her head back with her breath tight, but at last drank it all in, "I don't want a-a-a-a-anything from you...."

Amy closed her mouth and stood confident to prove her fearlessness, but her twitching eyelids and shaking fingers spoke other lies.

"...Then _what_," Shadow's jaw clenched. "Do you _want_? I'm not brain-dead either, Rose! The way you talk to me..." he spat. "...The way you _look_ at me," he squinted, his head slowly turning with his eyes remaining locked on her all to exaggerate his disgusted confusion. "I will not, _will_ not be another piece of accessory for your obsessions to circulate around. I am no one's trophy, badge, or PRIZE to be won over."

Amy was squeezing the life out of her arm; he heard fabric and skin wheeze together. Her hand, upon that arm, was convulsing, convulsing with seizure-like wobbles, yet soon enough she released it to let her arm breathe.

"..._Don't_ flatter yourself..." Amy's fists shook at her thighs. "You think that's what I want? Another 'hopeless goal' to chase after? A chase more 'HOPELESS' than Sonic? That's not what I want from you, of you, or to make of you!"

Shadow's curiosity won the war against his upside down smile and evaporated his expression into anxiousness. The rarest of Amy's frowns slogged across her face.

"I just want to _help_," Amy dropped her shoulders and shook her head tiredly.

After reading her for ten seconds, Shadow closed his eyes and frowned deeper, "...It is not up to you to save me."

"I know that," Amy didn't need to think about her counter. "It's your job to save yourself, and only you can do that, but I'd like to help you," Amy held her head and shut her eyes; it hurt all of a sudden. "If n-not heal, then bandage some scars, and--"

"Amy." He cut her off.

And yet, his throat did not growl with any trace of hate. Amy's eyes climbed up to him. Her hands released her head, but hovered next to either temple. The usual line of emotion on his face was still there, but it had deflated some, and was even a bit strained in old sorrow and old pain adapted into angry agony. That same face, with those same lines of emotion, was closer to hers than a second ago.

"...Here I am, then," A whisper in the form of white breath curled out of his slow mouthing lips.

The throaty hitch in her breath shivered off her own.

"Allowing you to see everything that has made me who I am today," His lip shook with moderate rage that soon toned down into a mocking smirk, "To see the painful poetry that rhymes about my 'scars', the stitches that are unstitching, 'every inch, every scar'."

Amy's lips twisted in. Her glare was fighting a losing battle to hold those three muscles to frown.

"Now that you see me," Shadow inched closer with a whisper, Amy inched back with a whimper. "What will you do? How will you heal me? How will you 'illuminate' my...'world' with your 'little light'?"

His head ducked in and tilted into hers. A tear raced down her cheek and glanced off. His smirk shrunk off his mouth.

Shadow's eyes - dark, alive, passionate, pulsing, damned, lonely, exhausted - lazied up and down her face, then iced back up.

"Get inside my head, Rose," His harsh breath again - it was so hot and dank, it made her nose itch, made her adrenaline pump, and burned holes in her very fur till it scalded her very skin. "_See_ what I see, _feel_ what I feel, then you can 'heal me'. Because what can an _outsider_ preach? What can a thirteen year old girl who knows nothing about the misery, suffer, loss, and damnation forced past my reflux to swallow that I have gagged on, _give_ to me?"

Amy's eyes - unnerved, enticed, insecure, intoxicated, quaking, bloodshot from tears - sped up and down his face, before she swallowed hard, "I-I...don't know about those feelings, b-but--"

"Then if I _unleashed_ them, could you handle them?"

...Amy looked away, but Shadow's hand caught her face and snapped it back to his. His thumb and index finger mashed her cheeks together.

"_Don't_ run away; _see me_," He sounded angry, but his grip on both her cheeks wasn't painful. "This is all you've wanted, _isn't it?_"

Her orbs didn't leave any part of him. They stayed on his eyelids, his chin, his high eyebrows, his ears, his mouth, his tiredness - running between all of them at top speed.

Shadow's hand gradually left her cheeks; his thumb slithering off her lower lip as it bobbled back.

The wet pink strand pasted down to the side of Amy's mouth slowly snaked off, and he openly watched. Amy could feel his thumb's tremors, which was beneath her bottom lip. The hand ended up under her jaw; the fingers limply around her throat with his mind addicted to the steady beat of her pulse against his thumb.

"...Your pulse is racing," Shadow was confused, or so his voice said.

Amy tossed her head from side to side, side to side, and after so many slow shakes of the head, gathered the truth from her heart, "...I'm not scared of you..."

"You should be," His fingers squeezed on her neck with light, but testing pressure.

Another fat tear squiggled down her lip, dabbing on his glove. She showed no fear. The way she looked at him, with her face full of twitching nerves and her eyes thick with sympathy...

The way he looked at her, with his face full of control but his eyes complex with sadness...

Both were breathing hard with desire. Yet it was not sexual. Never sexual. His desire, to feel like the person she was evolving into, one without hardship on their shoulders, and to know what happiness, dreams, and purpose meant. Her desire, to make him feel like that.

Shadow released the nape of her neck. She swallowed as the pads of his fingers slipped off her hot skin. He closed the trembling hand and rejected her gaze by lifting his chin back up to where her bangs tickled under his mouth. Amy looked down, biting her cheek and shaken up.

As she nearly tore her pajamas' bottoms with her rickety hands, she felt his mouth move against the side of her bangs, "So then you've changed your perspective of me..."

Amy looked forward into what she could see of him - his white chest. He was so much taller when he stood up straight.

"...You've changed your mind about me," His white chest was closing in - he was leaning into her.

Her eyes were wide and frozen on his starry white patch, and she imagined his to be heavy or steady on the landscape beyond her headband. Hers were puffy and wet, and she imagined his to be dry and clear.

"...While my mind has always been the same about you?" His breath fell into her hair. "...._Little_ girl?"

Amy blinked; her eyelash cut past the chin of his muzzle, her eye watered over, her eyelid became heavy, her mouth went loose to limp.

...So he'd thought softly of her, ever since Ark?

Her three bangs bounced outright as Shadow's nose glided down each of them one by one to lower his face to - Amy's heart failed - ...hers. As his warm lips grazed down her wet forehead, she leaned into the side of his mouth, the source of warmth. If he'd let her, she might fall into a hypnotized sleep right here, in the sleets of negative twenty degrees Celsius, against his mouth's heat and his body's security.

"Amy Rose," His airy breaths tingled her eyes as he continued to reach down closer and c-closer.

Amy clutched the front of her shirt, her eyes screwing shut, her heart's beats wracking through her whole body. She was growing hotter than hot inside, so hot, that the rain now felt like acid dunking on her.

"You truly are and will always be..." Shadow's voice was low and erotic.

She closed her eyes, frowning, relishing in but fighting to control this feeling...

"The bossiest, most spoiled, most frustrating girl I've ever met," His breath kept trailing and trailing, and it was now trailing down to her nose. "But underneath all that..."

She opened her eyes, and saw his face. Shadow the Hedgehog looked down at Amy Rose; Amy Rose looked up at Shadow the Hedgehog.

Amy's face closed in on his with the watery fear still shimmering on her eyes. His started shimmering with translucent water in turn, but his frown had never been more concentrative, more determined. The sides of their noses brushed past one another.

She could see the rain leaking off the lips of his eyelids, and then the confusion, fear, and passion inside him. The bridges of their lips touched, a one-second graze of skin, of dazed confusion and hesitant rejection, not even enough to be a peck, as to how neither ever blinked.

His incoherent eyes burned, hers melted with submission.

They stood in the veil of rain, forehead against forehead, their black and pink bodies wringing with water and glistening like silk from the dampness. Their lips brushed every now and then as they breathed, barely kissing, barely massaging, barely pecking, barely deciding, just tip-toeing around one another's warmth and what could be.

Amy reached up, her last teardrops falling from the corners of tormented lips that juddered with rainwater. His breath shuddered against her mouth. It shivered all down her back, making her melt, making her crazy, poisoning her with sensations she had never even heard of.

She closed her eyes in overwhelm of the blood pounding in her ears and turned her head down, while his squeezed shut. Shadow breathed - perhaps panted - through his mouth as his fists shook at his sides. Just when Amy was moving away from him, Shadow hurried in and wrapped his lips around hers in a hard kiss that was muffled in her whimper and his grunt. Amy's eyebrows forced back as she puckered her lips against Shadow's trembling ones.

His mouth was burning hot but blubbery under the cold rain, like butter melting on hers. The taste of him was as heavy, stingy and mesmerizing as her first sip of alcohol. He felt so absolutely real and alive. He couldn't have been an artificial hedgehog. He was warmer than blood, his slobber tasted better than _Dasani_, his blood pressure was climbing and his heart rate ran like crazy, his muscles flexed in that impulse to hold her, he _felt_ and _thought._ How could anyone believe he wasn't so very real?

She wanted to touch him so badly, run her fingers through his slick black fur, trace his cheekbone in affection, drown her hands in his quills, or...or...

Amy Rose squeezed out the bottom of her shirt; Shadow the Hedgehog squeezed his mouth harder around hers. A kiss could never be more simple and clean.

She let out a mew when his scared fingers trailed up her stomach, riding the fabric of her shirt up her navel, making her shiver after the heel of his ice-cold glove brushed the nudity of her belly. Slipping under the shirt, he rubbed the back of his knuckles up and down her weak stomach to soothe her. Her insides jumped and pinched in at his touch with tension before deflating into relaxation. Slimy but fluttery warmth, as thick as syrup, soaked her underwear just from this beautiful touch. It wasn't out of arousal, it wasn't out of lust, it wasn't out of prematurity, it was out of an emotional cleanse, a let go of doubt, fear, sadness, confusion, a release of relief, and it made the cotton stick like glue to her thighs. She wobbled and shook where she stood under Shadow's hesitance but tenderness, her cheeks flushed and her face oily from sweat and rain.

It was innocent.

It was beautiful.

...And it was crazy.

Their mouths opened wide to gulp in a breath of each other; the tips of their rain-slobbed tongues touched, but just then, Shadow's hand trembled up and squeezed her shoulder to stop their virginal experimentation.

Amy feverishly opened her eyes, Shadow feverishly opened his. They stared into each other, both feeling the cold ether of reality on their spines, both of their worlds almost_connecting_...

The moisture from their mouths squelched as his lips slipped off hers. Shadow's expression didn't change or malform. The whites of his eyes stung wetly.

Amy's hands slowly found her mouth. She held it, blinking tears away as her fingertips slithered off her throbbing lips. He tore his hand out of her shirt and shoved himself off of her, throwing himself and her a good few feet back. Shadow the Hedgehog shook in wild-eyed shock from his distance in the darkness. Sitting flat on her butt in see-through pajamas, Amy coughed, sneezed, and then squealed out when sudden hail rained down on her. She could hear Shadow muttering, cursing, hollering, and even exploding his fist through something as hard as stone, and could do nothing but cry out as the famous green light warped him out of space and time. When she looked up, she found the gargoyle's head missing.

Her eyes niggled with sticky wet heat.

Was she...that disgusting?

Has a weakness been triggered INSIDE of me?

_'Why?'_

I rampaged down the streets and stoplights of Station Square faster than what the eye human could see.

_'Why?'_

There's a disjointed pang in my jaw from gritting so hard, and a fire scorching my eyeballs out of their socket junctions from trying to keep this hysterical mania back.

My heartbeat skipped its rhythms and beats and blood-pumps when a set of lights blinded me. I back-flipped out of the way and landed on the top of a supply truck, leaping back into the sky from building to building, streetlamp to streetlamp, trying to calm myself down, trying to brace a sound mind, trying to _fucking_ make sense of everything.

_'Why?'_

This...is the first and only time I will admit I'm terrified and horrified in the same stretch beyond all traumatizations I've underwent.

What damnable force of gravity magneted me to that girl's mouth? To touch any flesh or fur that's patched and sewed onto her body? Did I think I could drink up her aimless happiness and source of rejuvenation and make it my own, so that I can live an easy life as she has? So that I can see the rainbow spectrums of ultraviolet that she sees? So that I could understand it, her, this, and rehabilitate myself? I can only remember fractions and fragments of what just went our between our bodies, our lips, our..._almost_ our tongues. All I can still relive are drunken feelings, bubbling hot sensations, flurry fantasies, stimulated hormones, the smell of strawberries in her hair, the taste of toothpaste and candy.

_'WHY?'_

This is beyond any experience I have ever experienced. This is beyond trauma, hatred, friendship, or adoration. This is beyond Maria. This is extra and foreign. These are emotions untapped, untouched, and have been uptill tonight. Never have I thought about kissing, touching, caressing, _fucking_ face-sucking. I burned at the seams and very core for her soul upon every word she had woven into that high-toned - but in that moment -_tender_ voice she spoke with tonight. Everything that she said made me weak in the knees and strong in the mind. Her voice and heart-ruled mind has been the best sound and influence that has ever graced my ears in the past and present, and it lures me to look at her with admiration and even pity.

I want it daily.

I want her voice in my ear daily.

I want her in my company daily.

I want her to speak to me about life, morals, ethnics, belief, and the world, daily.

I want to know what she believes in.

I want to share with her a sense of common sense.

I want to prepare her for reality.

I want her to prepare me for dreams.

I want to listen to everything secluding what Sonic's favorite damn color is other than himself, and how what kind of house they'll have in the future.

And because of this, want out. I desire to not form any emotional ties with any person, for it's something they and myself are unprepared for.

I..._fear_, doing what most mortals and immortals experience in their lives; falling in love and failure. I was never taught how to achieve one without preventing or losing the other. Either would leave my back unprotected, raw and vulnerable, dent my character, and amputate me of power and mind.

And I have never been so afraid as I was tonight.

A person in love is weak. They will die for their lover. They will do anything for their lover, and the more they give, the more it will control them, until they have lost themselves and their dignity.

This cold, grudging, cruel, arrogant person so deeply rooted into me..._is __not__ me._ I was neither always nor once this person. How else am I to protect myself, those around me, and mainly, my heart? This is why I ponder over and over what it is that girl _does_ to protect hers while being honest about whom she is.

...Please, Amy Rose, do not ask me to stay with you as your wish. After all, I am not your first; I am your sudden.

I perched on the high pole of the tallest tower in the city with my arms crossed. Everything about Amy Rose went blank once I saw three G.U.N. helicopters circling over an area a ways too close to Amy's block.

But, going back to her now...

I have planned to go back after I have pulled myself together and fortified myself to become immune to her, but I haven't found all of me just yet to do that.

I shut my eyes and conjure peace in silence. '_Admiration is fine...however, I will not allow this scattered admiration to mature into anything more. Responsibility is my key concern - and there is a mission to be completed. That must come first.'_ I look into the lights dozing across the skies. _'...When it has been sorted, perhaps I will...'_ _Delve into it more, and...ratify my conclusions to announce to a solid solution.'_

I leapt over rooftops and steam factories until I reached Amy and watched Amy's apartment from the distance. I narrowed my eyes as the rain drizzled in the cold wet air, and in that split second of a moment, my body came to a jolt. Out of an even more ridiculous nowhere, a piercing ring went off inside my brain waves and martyred me to the bones. I clawed at my skull and ears, my eyes rolling into the back of my head as I gasped out in torturesome excruciation. In martyr, I jumped off the pole and landed on a nearby building as all my senses dragged me towards the presence where my problems heightened.

...S-Something was, numbing my b-brain. It felt like...it was going to EXPLODE!

* * *

_**Amy's Apartment**_

_**

* * *

**_

Amy Rose took her time dragging her feet from the roof's stairs and into her apartment complex. She didn't bother respond to her landlord when he cussed about her leaving puddles of rain down the halls and that he'd no sooner like to kick her out on the street with her and her Sonic posters. With her ears hanging low, she didn't want to think or feel right now.

Shadow, Sonic...she didn't want to think about them. Tails was still sleep, so there was no one to talk to but Mrs. Diary and Mrs. Wall.

She wanted some sleep herself and deal with the self-afflicting stress of being alone. Amy locked her door and began peeling her wet clothes off. As she was lifting the shirt over her head, her lazy fingers went and brushed along her belly in a nostalgia she had been trying to block out. His touch still tingled around her navel like a ring of fire. It was still alive and basking on her.

Somehow she thought he was her answer because she was his answer, or a temporary antibiotic until they could mentally and emotionally hold their own. She really thought, in some light, he _needed_ her - at least until he found himself.

But Shadow would most likely be just fine on his own, like always. She'd go on with her life, and she'd live an ordinary life just fine.

Amy's clothes fell in a pile around her ankles.

...But what if fine and ordinary wasn't enough?

She looked up into the lights.

...What if she wanted...extra-ordinary and remarkable?

* * *

_**Outside Amy's Window**_

_**

* * *

**_

"Oh my, my, my~," Came the clucking of a peeping tom.

A dark shadow hunkered down in front of Amy's bedroom window and ogled her on the other side of the glass. He pressed his fingertips against the glass, licking his lips and around them like a child in front of a candy store.

"What a _fine_ looking Rose," The demon-eyed shadow sighs, and then cracks a giggle, "Shame, such a beautiful Rose's pink petals will be red by the end of the night."

He stressed a sympathetic smile as a blade shot out from its slot-hole. He rested his hand on his heart.

"...I almost disdain doing this," His eyes went from softened sadness to an angular sneer for murder, "...Just~ not quite."

He grinned a toothy smile.

"...We'll just...' his tongue dragged up his clean blade, "...fool around until Sir Shadow Lancelot returns."

He glanced behind him at the clueless cat clinging to a tree branch. The figure reached his hand out of the shadows to pet the cat, which appeared to be a humanoid hand gloved in black and red leather. The cat purred and nuzzled his hand.

"Oh~ _yes_, Ms. Puss, when I say 'fooling around'," His eyes danced up to the nude Amy slyly. "I meant to make it as _dirty _as possible."


	7. The Truth of Fifty Years Ago

**_WARNING: ....Sexual content._**

* * *

**Chapter: ****The Truth of Fifty Years Ago **

* * *

Sigh~.

"He's as damned as he seems~…"

Her finger reached for the bedroom light's switch.

"A tragedy with~, more damage than a, soul should see…"

_[-Click-]_

"And do~ I try to save~ him, my whole world could cave~ in..."

The room's light dunked into darkness.

"He's never enough~…"

Her finger slid off the switch.

"…And still he's more than I can take."

The bed's weight sunk as pink legs crawled into it. The weight bounced back as Amy Rose's head dumped on the pillow with the covers tucked up to her chin.

"…Oh~ and I don't~ know, I don't know what he's af~t-ter…"

She rubbed her runny nose and wheezed on mucus before rolling over and facing the open window.

The dogs were barking in the neighborhood and the cats were in heat. The night breeze played tag with the window's curtains.

"And do I...t-try to...change~ him," Amy sniffed up her cold. "So~ hard not to...b-blame~ him..."

The longer she stared at her windowsill, the more the darkness on her bedroom walls slithered up to the window's ledge like possessed strands of black hair. Those black strands would then yarn together to morph the illusion of Shadow the Hedgehog crouched in her window on one knee.

She visualized his black body with a blanket-twisting anxiousness. She visualized the splash of white in the middle of that black body, and his red racing stripes spiked on their quills. She visualized the whites of his eyes and the reds of their whites that were calm but earnest like candlelight instead of a raging bonfire as they shadowed her. A magnificent, fearsome, black thing standing in front of the moon's face. The visualizations tuned out all other sounds around her.

...The longer she stared at the windowsill, the more bloodshot her eyes rawed. Her fingers fisted and shook on her blanket.

And then to mock her, everything she felt, everything that happened, the imaginary Shadow went 'poof' like a burst of black confetti.

The dogs outside started barking again.

Amy inhaled the tears that she might cry tonight, ""But he's so beauti~ful, s-such a... beautiful disa~ster…"

The cats outside began howling again.

Amy yanked the blanket over her face. She took a deep breath, and then _screamed_. Kicked and screamed and squealed and whined until she was gasping for more breath. There was no _reason_ to cry. Life was going to go back to the way it was tomorrow morning. Life _will_ go on. Amy blowed out a hopeless huff.

...A dog outside yipped out a strangled wail.

"...Mm?" Amy shifted her head on the pillow.

...The cat in her window hissed, but then started screaming, till it all stopped.

Fingers nerve-wracked, Amy was tempted to lower the blanket and peek up into her pitch-black room, but it was horror-film-quiet. She could hear her thoughts and even her _teeth_.

_**[ - Creeeee-eeeek - ]**_

The pink girl, almost nude in her long shirt and underwear, cowered in her bed, frozen in stone from head to toe.

Was Michael Myers in her room? Was Freddy summoning himself from under her bed? Was it Lil' Slugger with his golden baseball bat, the boy who rescues the desperate from their crisis through bloody violence?

_**[ - Creee-EEEEK - ]**_

She flipped over onto the other side to face away from the constant creaking, and tried to sing her fears away, "A-A-And if I could hold~ on, through the t...t-tears~ and the laugh~ter, would it be beau~tiful?"

_**[ - CREEEEEK - ]**_

Amy forced her eyes shut until the skin of her eyelids strained, "O-Or! Just a beautiful disa~ster!"

...And then the nightmare touched her.

_'Th-This can't be happening...'_

It transformed into a tangible sensation that made her eyeballs burn from the salt in her tears. It haunted down her shoulder like a finger on a map, a sharp, stomach-retching claw that raked its perverted curiosity down the goosebumps on her arms, down the elbow of her forearm, down the dip of her waist and to the slope of her hip.

_'N...no...please, please...'_

Sweat rolled into the corners of her eyes where the tears accumulated. She dared not blink. Not move. Not peep. Not cry. Because then she might die. The phantom might take her soul. Lil' Slugger might bash her upside the head just for the suspense of it. She saw her hammer sitting there by her lamp, just inches away from where her finger lay. Amy clenched her teeth as a sweat-roll dribbled into her mouth. The nerves in her fingers constricted and twitched.

_'I...I can't move...!'_

It rode back the sheets protecting the thigh, protecting the leg, protecting puberty's gift connected to the body the clawed nightmare seemed to ravish. Her toes curled up at the cold breeze cutting at her ankles.

Amy's eyes squeezed up.

_'I can't MOVE!'_

The talon grazed into the small of her back and hit her pressure point, making her arch and shake and shiver and weep from pleasure, pain, and desperation. The vomit was sitting in the middle of her throat. Gods, no, she couldn't take it. Once the touch left her back and slicked the hair off her collarbone to expose her vulnerable little throat, she cringed out a whimper, making the tears spring off her eyelashes.

That's when the phantom's warm, breathy voice murmured into the side of her neck, "Shhh...do not fear me, Pink Rose. I won't harm you."

The tears broke through the dam as Amy's gasp inflated her lungs.

...She knew this voice.

Amy Rose glanced past her shoulder, still squinting out all her tears and her all-so-powerful weakness as the victim she had often been. Her eyes grew three dilations above-average at who she saw, standing behind her shoulder.

Looming over her bed in the dark was a shadow with red eyes like hellfire. His eyelids were lowered, drawn and eerie. There was too much black eclipsing his face from the dark, but she could make out the bronze color of his muzzle under a streak of moonlight.

"You...came back..." Amy flushed as she scooted onto her back, tears drowning her voice to a soggy blubber.

She saw his eyes thin more, like a cat in the night, and a smirk of white fangs smiling at her.

...Amy's sentimental happiness browed down into a frown.

He hunkered down into her, hands on either side of the bed, until she could taste his breath, until she was squirming and worming in a discomfort that was contradicting her inner need to have him closer. She could taste his breath in her nostrils and on her taste-buds, and found herself drunk; head light and fuzzy, unable to think and see the shapes and corners of her bedroom. Amy lazed her eyes up and down his face, trying to picture it, trying to get lost in it.

"I can smell your tears..." His throaty, unusually sinister use of tone was grinning mockery at her.

She shook her head against the pillow, opening her mouth to sob out--

"Hush, Rose..." The shadow pecked the corner of her mouth, making her flinch at just that tibit of warmth smacking off her skin.

...Amy sucked her lip behind her teeth. The tears rose their elevation.

"Be still...be silent..." The moisture in his breaths kissed her shoulder as he lowered his head.

He let it whisper up the cord of her throat as he came back up to her face with his eyes flitting up to see hers.

Just when...was he this beautiful?

Amy swallowed her butterflies. Her fingers were begging her to let them thread themselves in his hair and tangle its black follicle in their grasp. The shadow looked her from the eyes to the mouth, plotting something behind that emotionless sensuality in his face, before clamping a small bite onto her lower lip. She 'eep'-ed and adjusted to turn away and escape the emotions bursting through her right then and there, but his tongue belly-danced on the chapped lip at a steady beat, till it was soft, wet, and soggy. The fat tears drop off one by one as Amy's mouth trembles against the saliva being swirled around her lips. She hugged the sheets into her chest and shook violently and couldn't keep herself from all the shaking. Again, he eyed her under his eyelid, eyeing her reactions and calculating her hot-spots. He dragged a slobbery tongue up along that bottom lip of hers as his breath washed over her mouth. The animalistic erotica roused her toes to curl until they turned white. His tongue's tip flicked off with a flick of that slobber.

Amy gulped and sighed her fevering hotness, licking around her mouth to taste what he left without meaning to, "Sha--"

"I said, 'shhh', Rose..." The shadow traced the bone of her cheek with his needle-nose, the bridges of his mouth brushing the skin every once and a while. His claws lightly scratched up her belly till his hand snuck into her shirt.

Amy turned her head away to resist and enjoy as her stomach arched into his palm like a needy cat in heat, but he jerked her face back to him by the chin. Before she could whisper her hesitations to him, he smothered her in a hard kiss. The breath she loved filled her mouth faster than his tongue. She bowed her head down, causing their lips to smack off, but he, once again, gobbled her into another kiss. His fangs locked around the corners of her mouth and his tongue filling her throat each time.

"Shadow, Shadow..." She worried his name softly with her eyes closed as she continued breaking the kisses he continued joining.

Amy pushed her hands into his chest, but his body refused to be pushed back, and her arms' joints were crippling, for her body refused to refuse him. She didn't understand what she was feeling. What was this? What was going on?

But then he whispered through the wet smacks between their mouths more desperately than she would to Sonic, "Tell me...do you love me?"

...Slowly, tearfully, and weakly, Amy Rose's eyes opened to the shadow's face.

She blinked between the wisps of her hair clawing her face as she searched these, red depths _drinking_ up her reaction, in a heavy spell that made her dizzier than any flu. Her head bedded in her kiss-curls, she swallowed deep and hard. The slow frown tightening her forehead made the water rush to her eyes again. Her next lungful of air came out in a shudder.

"Tell me, Rose..." The shadow's growl puckered into a purr. "Tell~ me..." The purr slithered into a whispering hiss.

The talented tongue of his lapped at her again, sliding underneath her topper lip's gums before the shadow drew her into his mouth for a hard suckling. Amy's sudden yelp ended in an exhaling whine at the feeling of his clawed thumb stroking the underside of her breast. Her hips rolled and rose as she opened her mouth in a silent but strangled moan that she didn't know she had in her. Both of her tinier hands clenched around the wrist snaked up her shirt, physically pleading him to continue no more. Her body wasn't made to contain all these new feelings. It hadn't hit that stage of puberty and mental maturity. Sh-she didn't_ understand_. She was a _little girl_!

The claw dragged its jagged edge around her hardening nipple in spite of it.

Her eyes fought to flicker open and her hand squeezed tighter and tighter on his wrist as his handful of razor-sharp talons tattooed and tagged lines into her breast's skin. She wanted him to stop, so how come her body couldn't fight harder?

_'Please, oh please, make it stop, make it stop. I don't want to feel anything anymore!'_

The wounds on her breasts did not bleed, but the prickly titillation was enough to have her inhaling her squeals in almost masochistic arousal she still didn't understand, and it scared her. She was a little girl, being touched and felt and kissed in 'bad places.' Helpless. Ignorant. Innocent.

Pants becoming labored heat, Amy mumbled between squeals, "Why...Wh-Wh~y-y! A-Are...you doing this...?"

"Tell me if you love me, Rose..." The shadow's aggression coiled into the vocals of an angry Cobra. "Tell me..."

Her shoulders hugged into her cheeks as he reached another claw up and slid it back and forth across her pink lip, persuading both lips to quiver open to his liking.  
Her fingers followed reflex and gripped onto the shadow's shoulder blades, curling themselves into fists on his fur, begging him to stop making her feel such 'weird things.'

Amy's wet eyes rolled around to the side of her bed when she felt its weight sink. She flinched when the other side sunk as well. Her sight lazy and disorientated and fogged with tears, it wasn't until their blur cleared that she saw the shadow's two black legs had climbed into the bed. She mumbled and grumbled nothings that were supposed to be 'what are you doing' somethings before looking up into the black face still blotted out by the darkness.

So hot...why?

She dug her fingers deeper into his fur, feeling the skin.

His body was so hot, so drenched in that stench of wet dog...

His crotch, her loins...

Everything spinning out of control. Nothing but darkness and feelings. Nothing but confusion and heat. Nothing but bodies...why?

"...You want me to love you, don't you?" He manipulated, his wordiness suave, hard, and _thick_ with the intense determination to be deep inside of her.

The seductor's groin hovered above hers. That hot place she felt brushing her thigh. That sticky humidity making her insides moist and slippery. That thing making her feel all those _other_ weird things.

"So then tell me..." The shadow's claw lowered her bottom lip and fingered her tongue. "If you love me..."

She squeaked as the rainwater matted in his fur dripped off his inner thigh and soaked into her underwear, bleeding through the fabric and kissing the raw lips of her _'untouched'_. The cold, liquid chill made her stomach flutter in warning of that beautiful, warm surge inside of her melting its way into the surface.

"Love me, and I will love you..." The sryup-thick heat of his groin pressed against the silk of her underwear.

She arched her neck and closed her lips around the claw, her eyelids twitching upwards.

"Hmph..." His nostrils snorted out. "Taste me, then..."

He retracted his claw from her mouth, Amy's sucks still puckered in a tight ring around it before she allowed it to leave her late-blooming desire.

"_Taste_ me..." He sounded miles and miles away, but she felt it warmer than a summer breeze when he lowered his mouth to hers, hovering there, awaiting his rose to peel back the pedals.

Eyes shut, forehead sweating, fur musty and mind blank, Amy opened her mouth like the timid, unsure, scared child she was, and answered to his submission. He bent into the small mouth harboring the saliva-glistening tongue, and opened his own against hers.

"_Taste_ me," He dares her, mouth open and fangs welcoming her curiosity, but not kissing her.

...Her tongue stretched past her teeth and dabbed against one of his fangs. Feeling more confidence when he does nothing, it traced down the saber, played and licked at the sharp tip, and she feels his lips that her tongue brushed grin in advance.

She delves her hands in his hair, learning his mouth as he held it open for her to learn it, tasting every secret, every memory, every corner and every stretch, dragging up the warm gummy walls and leaving sticky trails of her adventure, stroking the flat plane of his own tongue and feeling every bumpy bud she slobs over, having _no clue_ of what she was doing. She almost felt her orgasm upon her when he unleashed an _aw~_ing sigh into her mouth. When her face is hot enough and when she begins to change the angle of her head to slip her nervous tongue down his throat, he _traps_ her.

His fangs chomp down and sink into her tongue, _painfully_. Amy's eyes bugle open as she screams into his mouth, the blood beginning to bite at her taste-buds. She grips into the skin of his muzzle's cheeks and tries to tear him off her, hollering and sobbing all through the struggle, but he smothers his laughter into her throat and attacks her mouth with his fangs and lust, gorging on her like meat. The tears start gushing and streaming. The nightmare is real.

Amy thrusts her knees into the demon's stomach and heaves him off of her in one last action of fury. The shadow thunked on the floor without trying to break the fall, and rolled over onto his back, cackling like a mad man.

Amy wormed out of the covers and dove for her weapon.

"W-Who are you, and what are you doing in my room?!" Amy rubbed the tears, mucus, and bloody drool from her face as her hand strained to steady the hammer.

She crouched low as the laughter faded away, like it was shrinking into the distance before it flew to the other side of the room. She readied her hammer in front of her between snivels and sobs of trauma.

"You were so eager for it, Pink Rose," the darkness hissed. "You must still be _dripping_ on the carpet as we speak..."

Amy's hand skulked down to the bottom of her shirt to hide the leaking underwear that was more than enough leaving pitter-pats on the carpet between her feet. She had been violated, manipulated, _touched _where she shouldn't have been touched. She focused her terror on one corner of her bedroom, where she saw the darkness move - stand up and ghost across the room - and then the red eyes of Satanism flung open.

"So eager to be _loved_ and not even fully _bloomed_," The silhouetted shadow began to drift toward her. "A while longer, and I could've slurped up your nectar till you screamed, ah?"

Amy's hand scrabbled for the light switch behind her. Her throat tightened up her airways until she was wheezing and convulsing once the shadow's shoes stepped into the moonlight.

Two steel shoes banded in leather.

Amy's wanderings traveled up the black legs, which were missing their stripes unlike another's she knew.

Up the freed claws and leathered hands unlike another's she knew.

Up the wrists jeweled with three sets of power rings unlike another's she knew.

Up the chest furred in one feather of white unlike another's she touched, and into the V-shaped glare sinking down into vengeful, but smirking eyes like another's she's stared down.

His fangs gave her a white smile. His horned-looking ears were bitten and tagged with laboratory numbers.

"Good evening, Pink Rose," The black hedgehog craned his neck up with a tilted grin, looking evermore cocky with insanity than the last second. "Blossoming season's not too good this year around, is it?"

Amy shook her head back and forth, dropping her hammer and backing away.

"What's wrong, Rose?" he threw a desk aside to advance closer. "Are you disappointed and disgusted now that you've looked upon your bed-lover? Am I so, so _hideous_ to you?" He pretended to be heartbroken while grinning in the same 'sad' expression.

"You can't be...You _can't_ be _Shadow_!"

His lip rode back. He stopped short and lowered his chin to exaggerate his growling, "_That_, is _not_ my fucking name. That _name_ belongs to the one beneath me," He raised his hands in the air, announcing to 'The Gods' in laughter, "The world's Ultimate Abomination _born_ from man's experiment gone wrong!"

"_Shut up!_" Amy threw her feist around. "Shadow's NOT an abomination!"

The tears had swelled her eyes into pink veined yokes and her muzzle was dirty with all the sobbing, making her look about as mad as the shadow beckoning her out of her mind.

"And what would you know about Shadow the Hedgehog?" He chucked her dresser into the wall, causing it to explode into a thousand splinters. "How many DOCUMENTS have you rummaged through, to know who he is?" He ripped open her Unicorn with his fangs until the stuffing foamed out of its head. "Can you even read, little Pink Rose?" His forked tongue wagged at her.

Amy shut her eyes and brought her hammer down on the foreign stranger's head...and then she opened them just to see his one, skinny finger had stopped the attack.

He dove into her air and breathed, "You have spunk, but spunk is nothing without strength."

His claws suddenly shot out of his fingertips like elongated razors. He traced a claw along her face, a bloodline ripping through the skin of her cheek.

"Now tell me...does he love you, Rose?"

"M-My love-life is NONE of your business!" Amy hocked up her spit and spat in his eye.

"..." The shadow's grin convulsed. He swiped the bloody slob off his eyelid before nudging the finger into his mouth, suckling on it while keeping his aroused grimace on her.

Disgusted and frightened, Amy forced her sight away and buried her cheek into her shoulder as the tears rushed.

"Now Rose," His tongue wagged at the head of his finger. "Your love-life, is ALL of my business."

Suddenly, white hot pain shot up and down Amy's arm. She choked out a high-pitched scream and strained to reel her head down and witnessed the black claw buried into the juncture between her neck and shoulder. The red nerves in her eyes almost ruptured out of her sockets.

"So~ if you will not gossip with me, then...where IS your lover, hm?" The shadow slapped her lightly in the cheeks to get her attention. "Where's he at?"

Amy's bottom lip quivered as she burped up some blood from the claw pinning her into the wall.

"Look at me~, Rose. You don't wanna go to heaven, do you?"

Tempted by the oozing red her wound ejected, another claw stretched from his fingertip and threatened to penetrate her forehead with it. He held the scruff of her sweat-drenched bangs to bang her head back on the wall.

Amy sobbed as her mouth pooled and foamed with blood.

"Stop wasting my time and TELL me the TRUTH," he snapped all of the sudden and whipped his fist across her face.

Amy curled the carpet under her fingers as she spluttered, spat, and cried. "…I DON'T KNOW!"

"Lying gets you nowhere. You know this," The larger hedgehog kneeled down, threaded his fingers in her bangs and yanked her head back to the point of her vessels and veins almost erupting out of her constrained throat. "I'd be dying to kill you since this whole thing was ruined because of _you_…Amy Rose."

His foot slammed into her rib. The force, most likely having also shattered her bones, sent her flying into the wall. Amy's back sagged down the paint, leaving brush-strokes of red behind her until she sunk onto her knees and hands, vomiting.

"Don't worry, you won't be alone for long," The hedgehog licked his claws, laughing at himself when he accidentally cut his tongue, and turned to her with a bleeding tongue dangled from his smiling mouth. "I promise Shadow will be joining you very shortly so you two can always be together forever and ever."

The Satan of a creature raised his palms, the claws crowning his outspread fingers and ready to hack her up into chunks of meat.

Blood burned into Amy's left eye as it fought to stay awake. The world was flashing between old memories and new, the last bits and iotas of her life, the flashbacks of...Mystic Ruins, murderous red eyes, black and scarlet demon, a caramel smile...Shadow, and all the mysterious, but beautiful things he had proven to be in the end...

And the last thing Amy heard was the crash, but the last thing her eyes deciphered was shattered glass raining over her like diamonded shards, before her vision went asunder into darkness.

The murderer slowly raised his head beyond Amy's form.

There he stood, all black and red and vicious and helpless in all his glory. There he stood, still holding his head from the eerie ring that had now stopped with shards of glass at his feet, with his attention locked on one thing, and one thing only, with the most terrifying face of hysteria.

"...And there you stand," The murderer licked his lips, flashing a disturbingly wider grin that almost inched off his very muzzle. "Shadow the Hedgehog."

"..."

Shadow's eyeballs swelled into puffy red inflammations over the ball of pink drowning in the red at his feet...red, and more red, red everywhere, freckling the pink's cheeks, grinning on the pink's body in red smiles, swallowing the pink, until there lay barely any pink before him...just a body dunked in blood and sparkled in broken glass.

...That wasn't her body.

It **_wasn't_** her **_body!_**

That couldn't have been _her gold bracelet_ rolling across the floor and hitting his shoe.

"Having trouble breathing, Shadow?" The murderer flicked some ear wax off his finger.

Shadow's pupil almost engulfed his iris as the sound of gunshots went off in his hallucination, and all he saw now were red lights flashing at every interval of a winding hallway, panting and footsteps, before another gunshot exploded through his ears, and then the scream, his scream:

_**"MARIA!"**_

The scene melted away, and in a blonde-haired human girl's place, he recognized and finalized the truth of who was lying there before him, never to breathe for him again, or back-talk him when he was being too bold.

"…A-_my_…?" Shadow's throat closed so that the name hoarsened out like a puppy's whimper. He elevated his focus to the look-alike who was waving their blooded fingers with a innocent smile.

The impostor hedgehog.

...Shadow's lips twitched until they began curling back around his fangs. His jaw tightened to the hinge of breaking. The nerves that muscled his eyeballs were one strain away from exploding into bloody spurts. His glare darkened into bloodlust, his quills arched, his biceps pulsed as did the veins bulging out of his gloved fists, and the healing scab on his white bib now split open and bled. The rings that chained down his power freed his wrists.

"So then," The murderer bowed, "The GREAT Ultimate Life form has finally come to join us!" His arms flopped back down as his shoulder shrugged between his quiet laughter, one eye narrowing on Shadow, "Have you been DYING to meet m--"

Shadow cannoned his body at his victim in a gold power-beam like an unstoppable bull. The target just about sprained his ankle jumping out of range.

Shadow the Hedgehog thought of the blood that would be splattered along the walls soon, the red streaks from his meat exploding open with arteries and intestines, the howling scream as he stretched his meat's face until it was ripped open in two along with the pink, squishy brain sloshing onto the floor. The hate took over. All awareness of Amy's condition itself had been trashed, and the lust to slaughter was in its place. However, despite the demented drive to have his earlier image fulfilled, Shadow's explosive charge was not successful.

The edge of his spines raked the murderer's knee, leaving a loss of fur and an exposure to skin, but not a fatal wound. The only 'wound' he'd caused was the lack of a wall in Amy's bedroom. The impostor hedgehog snarled and flame-bladed to the other side of the room, waving at Shadow from the distance with a sweaty grin. The veins zig-zagged Shadow's forehead. He attacked head-on again and again, only destroying the walls at each failure to drill into his enemy despite his power-pump, his quills suffering the damage even more.

The impostor taunted, "For the love of Chaos, you're the Ultimate Life form, a title well to be known of; especially once you're dead with pinkie over there, you'll be famous."

Shadow charged this time; the savage insanity malforming his face into a black, deformed monster with fangs to devour, but the hedgehog dashed to the left side of the room in a trail of red with his arms still crossed like he hadn't even moved a centimeter all along, yawning. He juggled his red Chaos Emerald, hinting that he had slowed time to achieve the technique. Breathless, droopy-eyed and still gnarring his canines from using up his so much energy, Shadow used his Chaos Control to warp through space and time. The impostor closed his eyes and set his ears on the alert.

"I can feel your energy, Shadow." He smirked, the corner of his mouth undergoing a fit of seizures to prove his inner intimidation of the hedgehog. "In approximately ten seconds you'll reappear to ambush me from behind." His smirk deflated when his ear suddenly twitched. "...Shit..."

Shadow reappeared in front of him and lunged in his entire body weight to grab his meat by the throat, but the hedgehog had suddenly disappeared himself, leaving Shadow's hands to only grasp the air and put him off balance. This only enraged Shadow to the brink of mania; he flipped Amy's bed over and hurled it through the window.

Pupils almost completely gone from the whites of his eyes, he roared out to the ceiling with shaking palms of curled, convulsive fingers, "_STOP_ running the **fuck** away and let me **_RIP YOUR HEART OUT_**!"

From the other side of the room again, the impostor cut through the air and sliced through Shadow's waist with a Chaos Spear that resembled a thunderbolt in his hand. The fur tore and the blood sprayed as Shadow's yowl scowled into a growl. He straightened his fingers into alignment and made a dive for the hedgehog's chest to, quite _literally,_ rip his beating heart out. Panicked for the first time, the impostor rammed his fist into Shadow who blocked, creating a thick gravity wave. It was Shadow who backed him into the corner between flying jabs of white fists and the ripples of gravity bouncing off each elbow-to-fist and arm-to-kick blow. The blood from being scraped by the murderer's claws and Shadow's bare knuckles was splattering out of control and drying on both their faces like red paint.

Though there was something strange about the fight's pattern. With every hit and every attempt to hit, the impostor hedgehog copied Shadow move for move, and for a moment, Shadow felt like he was battling his reflection and not a real enemy.

Shadow's hand squeezed the green gem to where it might've been crushed a moment more once the panting impostor distanced himself. The agenda had cleared for him once again - Get. To. **_Amy_**.

Salivating his madness, Shadow summoned up the spears in one hand and swung them at his target at the wrath of Zeus, "CHAOS SPEAR!"

The lightning spears soared earthwards in a rampage that would normally be inescapable.

The sweaty impostor held his ruby emerald at eye level, "CHAOS SPEAR!"

A substance of hellish glow swallowed up the impostor's fists. He fired the spears from his palms unlike Shadow's technique, but it remained a copycat move all the same. The spears collided into a massive explosion that destroyed the apartment's roof, causing Shadow to shield his face while attempting to sneak to Amy, while the impostor was grinning against the ripping winds as the unconscious Amy was thrown against the wall from the force of it.

The minute Shadow's foot stepped in Amy's blood was the minute his enemy yanked him by his quills and snapped his head back to fling him into the collapsing wall.

Shadow sat in a heap of rubble with blood in his eyes, numbed from the waist down and seeing crooked. He strained his eyes open between the bloodlines to send his dark glower back to the intruder.

The black hedgehog sighed playfully and sat down on the small cushion-stool beside Amy's demolished dresser as the ceiling continued to come down around them. "That's it...let's just take a break, shall we?"

Shadow grunted as he tried to remove himself from the crumbled layers of rock, but his arms were weak and his functions were beginning to shut down on him, reducing his body to plop back down into the stockpile. If he abused much more of his strength, he would fall into a coma without the supervision of a Dr. Robotnik's energy-pod. He peeked across his dead arm to confirm Amy's condition, but was squinting to see past the jitters in his vision. The need to reach her was in the way his fingers sunk into fists that bled from his claws digging into his palms.

"...Shadow~" The impostor crossed his legs.

Shadow's nose wrinkled as he ran his desperate gaze between Amy's scars, imagining what hell this bastard put her through, seeing the blood gurgling from her mouth and the pale pastiness of her fur's color dying away. His fangs caught into a vice-grit to retort the desperation into watery-eyed fury.

How **_dare_** he.

How **_DARE_** he--

"SHA-dow," The impostor was suddenly in front of him, yanking his chin up to look him in the eye.

All the while, the mix of trauma and hate in Shadow's face remained on Amy, till he ultimately upturned his glare to the impostor.

"...I want to tell you things," the hedgehog pressed his thumb and finger into Shadow's chin, fueling Shadow to growl. "Things you were never born to know. Things that'll make you _cry_. I have it all on a recorder. Would you like to hear it?"

Shadow shot his arm up to clout the hedgehog in the mouth with his elbow, but the hedgehog caught his forearm in the making and twisted it behind Shadow's back.

"GRAH!" Shadow's fangs locked down on his tongue to hold his scream.

The impersonator slit his eyes as his mouthpiece replayed a scientist's recorded speech from an official G.U.N. documentary,_"Project Shadow is the end result of 'The Ultimate Life Form' creation, the secret genetics project shut down a half century ago which objective was to reach immortality. Black Hole code-named Wrath was the in-between project among Project Shadow and Bio-Lizard. Black Hole was the second prototype, but was locked down by Gerald due to unfinished and malfunctioning circumstances. Or so, that is what the government tells us. Mmph-mmph, the details may run deeper than wh--"_

"There were only THREE weapons aboard the Ark, you BASTARD!" Shadow snapped his fangs at the hand on his chin.

The hedgehog continued, _"--what they tell us. Project Shadow and Bio-Lizard were not originally programmed to destroy Earth or become the weapons of mass destruction. Project Shadow's body was meant to be a cure for Professor Gerald's granddaughter's illness, but was later re-touched to become the military's weapon, nonetheless being left with the mind, heart, and personality of Maria Robotnik uptill recent changes within his programming."_

...Shadow's ears perked at this, but his jaw stayed clenched.

_"Black Hole code-named Wrath was to be created specifically for the military's policy purposes so we could leave Project Shadow the freedom of his original purpose, but the Black Hole project was left incomplete and useless. Where Project Shadow is artificial, Black Hole is mechanical. Though detained by the military for fifty-one years, its, uh...its memory bank was connected to the former Project Shadow's, giving Black Hole code-named Wrath access to the events plagued in Shadow's life. It's like a, uh...aheh, like someone evading your diary on a whole 'nother level, you see. While Black Hole code-named Wrath's body is, indeed useless whereas he is much weaker than Project Shadow, his mind is his power-house, so we and the rest of my crew here plan to finish the final furnishings of this forgotten tool. It'll certainly be exciting for us all--"_

The hedgehog's pupils returned to their regular state as well as his own voice.

"For them to meddle in my MIND as Gerald had done you, that is." He tapped his head. "Yet unlike you, I was created to know the truth."

Shadow tested the nerve-reactions in his foot. His energy was returning, but he'd strike when the stage was set.

Staring Wrath in the face, Shadow hissed under his breath, "I don't give a **_fuck _**WHO you think you are, stop prolonging your blood to spill!"

"Do not BLAME _me_," Wrath put a hand on his chest in gesture of himself. "Blame this...this _Rose_ for the events of today. For if it hadn't been for Amy Rose, everything would've gone according to plan a year ago aboard the Ark. And now, since you have abandoned Gerald's death wish, you are no longer useful. There is no life for you to live, because of what you are. You have no PURPOSE, and a mere project, a runaway experiment, has no reason to walk the Earth if it is purposeless." he added in, "Destroy or be destroyed, Shadow."

The muscles in Shadow's fingers contracted. _At last. He smirked up at Wrath with the blood-lust bleeding from his eyes and the veins clenched around his muzzle, "...I'm going to eat you __**alive**_."

Wrath smiled and tilted his head while looking into the madness of Shadow. "By the fury in your tongue, I can see your feelings for her are lethal to you like fire. Love is such a DREADFUL bond." As Wrath began to laugh, his laughter was suddenly hacked into a gagging choke once Shadow's hand trapped his throat.

"You want to know why I aborted my orders to Gerald Robotnik?" Shadow slowly stood from the rubble that fell off his shoulders and dangled his replica off his squirming heels. "Because of **_Maria_**."

"Yes!" Wrath's tongue arched to the roof of his mouth as he choked between cackles. "Yes, your little 'sister' Maria told _Project Shadow_, but she didn't tell _you._"

The hedgehog once again replayed the recorded session of Rouge the Bat's oral letter report, _"During my latest criminal investigation, I found secret information about Project Shadow through a Security Hole in GUN, and informed the President. It was a letter addressed to Professor Gerald from the President of its time, thirteen Presidents ago, confidentially requesting him some new research. The subject of the letter is as follows."_

"...**_Shut up..._**" Shadow rasped, still choking the hedgehog off his feet, the hedgehog who still continued to replay live voice information.

_"Mankind's ultimate eternal dream, researching for immortality. Gerald had refused this request stubbornly, for it crossed over Man's limits. However (although ironically), in the end, Gerald's dearest granddaughter "Maria Robotnik" gave him a reason to look over the plans. Maria suffered from an illness "NIDS: Neuro immunodeficiency syndrome", by which medical treatment was difficult to provide. Although she seemingly could not expect recovery from this, medical treatment research was continued aboard the ARK, before they finally thought the incurable disease could be conquered because of Gerald's declaration of his new immortality studies. Advanced research was strictly confidential inside the ARK. Records state, "Project Shadow" was named this because of the sarcasm involved in not actually being able to create a Shadow (Which didn't exist in the world)."_

"I told you to SHUT UP!" Shadow slammed Wrath into the wall.

And still, the now robotized hedgehog's mouth did not stop moving, "_At first, everyone thought that this plan was far too reckless and far-fetched to have ever been fabricated by Professor Gerald's gifted mind. Chaos Emeralds were researched and resulted in the creation of Chaos Drives, which were a test to apply their infinite energy to a life, while the main project would only be started once the prototype was complete. The "Prototype of the Ultimate Life-form", made after the image of a lizard, showed many signs of wonderful growth; regeneration, restoration, and self-reproduction. The researchers were thrilled at this."_

Shadow jumped on top of Wrath's immobilized body and snatched the back of his head, jabbing it over and over and over and over again into the wall to break the hedgehog's skull.

Despite having his head blown through the wall and his voice box being cracked down to a malfunctioning robot, the hedgehog's program kept running on Rouge's report, "_But___while_their_joy_of ___how____w-w-w-w-w-----well_the Prototype___was doing___quickly went to their heads, it became unruly and hard to control causing many problems. A voice of doubt soon arose, as they questioned their continuation on this project, as well as the safety of others aboard. The truth is uncertain, about who had leaked private information about the Project to GUN, however it was considered to have been one of the few who were concerned with the Prototype, as it became reckless."_

Shadow dropped Wrath's mangled body as the bedroom seemed to change its format to the outer galaxy. His body in suspended space seemed to be slanted above the Ark.

_"Those who were among the top ranking of GUN, had a strong disliking of the research organization, and formulated a plan to shut down the ARK itself, taking advantage of its current situation. Their secret plan was code named, " Ark's Indestructible Seal."_

The background walls dissolved into melting squiggles that soon spiraled into the colors of another room - a team of scientists arguing beside the heart of the Eclipse Cannon's designs.

_"All of the colony's residents were to be evacuated from a bio hazardous calamity generated from within the ARK research institution, and it would be sealed away. This was their ostensible purpose of the strategy. Of course, the true purpose was to close the ARK research facility, erase Project Shadow, and put the blame to Professor Gerald as the person who had caused the accident."_

The scenery spun back to the metallic halls with the emergency alerts blaring and commanders shouting to, _"Stop them!"_

_"The plan was carried out, on the premises that GUN knew nothing, and within only seven days of the Plan's commencing, all the residents of the ARK were moved to the planet. All the research facilities aboard the ARK were frozen by GUN, and all persons involved in Project Shadow, except for Professor Gerald, were announced as victims of the disaster. The plan was finally completed, when the "Prototype of the Ultimate Lifeform" was found, and then sealed away in the deepest part of the Colony."_

Shadow froze on the spot to behold the scene-replay of Maria and 'Project Shadow' heading straight for him.

"…Maria…" Shadow whispered.

He reached out to touch her as she drew near, but her body ran right through him like a ghost from a sick dream, leaving him with a tingly sensation all down his spine. He just stared into space like a helpless, speechless fool deaf, dumb, and blind by all that was happening around him as silent tears came to his eyes.

He stared into the mouth of the gun being pointed at him by the G.U.N. soldier whose name he desired to hunt down. Shadow's tears were blinked into mid-air as the bullet ripped through his translucent self. What came next was Maria's shrieking cry and 'Project Shadow's' memorable, _**"MARIA!"**_

_"....But, there was miscalculation in their plan. It seemed Professor Gerald was already finishing off the Ultimate Lifeform "Shadow", but using another desirable form, when the plan was being executed. When GUN's Special Forces rushed into the research institute, Gerald escaped, and entrusted it to Maria, his granddaughter, checking to make sure that the one escape capsule was ejected toward the planet. (In addition, the whereabouts of the capsule at that time were not known.) Now, it is not known if the hedgehog "Shadow the Hedgehog", being the "Shadow" that was sealed away in Prison Island, was a copy created by someone else, or was the original "Shadow" that was ejected toward the planet. There is no real way to confirm this anywhere..."_

Shadow went on staring, mouth agape, and pupils shriveled back into their red.

_"'Shadow the Hedgehog' was never created during the week GUN's plan was executed, so 'Shadow the Hedgehog' never knew about the Prototype, or the destructive powers it possessed. But, at the moment GUN's plan was executed, Gerald had told Maria to escape with Project Shadow, and ran away to escape any intentions of being caught. Gerald had watched out of a monitor/out a window, to see the capsule Project Shadow was in leaving the colony."_

The background rippled back to Amy's battle-field bedroom, and Wrath, now climbing back onto his feet, was himself again.

"Note the text mentions an 'Original piece' of Project Shadow." He wiped the blood from his chin. "It's most likely Rouge doesn't believe that the 'Shadow' standing before me was actually the one from fifty-one years ago. She and even me, believe that, perhaps, the original Shadow that was in the capsule, died upon impact. Someone else found 'Project Shadow' and made a clone to revive it. The clones of original life forms usually can retain certain memories that they had before. How else could you only remember part of the past and portions of Maria's dying death wish--"

"Shut..." Shadow smashed his fist into Wrath's cheek, beating the blood out of him. "...the _FUCK_..." He kneed him in the jawbone before slamming both fists down on his back to bury him in the ground. "**_UP_**."

On his hands and knees, Wrath coughed up the blood souring his throat and leaking through his broken teeth. His under-eyelid was bleeding as well in a sign of the right side of his face beginning to sag off like melting skin.

"I don't have TIME for your pathetic lectures of whom or what I am!" Shadow dragged Wrath out onto the floor by his hair, and bashed his head through the window before jerking him back in.

Wrath gurgled, croaked, and coughed out his bloody drool onto Shadow's face with a few chips of broken glass wedged into his mouth and punctured eyeball.

Shadow roared his pride as proudly as any lion despite the red fluid sliming down his cheek, "I am SHADOW, _Shadow_ the _**HEDGE-hog**_, and that is all I need to know!"

He said it out of consideration for Amy. His gratitude for her everything, for all her efforts and pressing persistence to guide him through the walls he couldn't walk around. As of right now though, this, 'Wrath' person was the wall in his way of Amy herself.

Shadow's eyes crossed over to her worriedly. She was still breathing - still clinging to the cliff.

_'...I'm running out of time...'_ Shadow closed his eyes as the sweat beaded his brow, before forcing them open on Wrath's grinning face. _'He, MUST die.'_

**Outside**--------

Sonic knocked on Amy's apartment door for the fifth time.

"Come on, Amy! It's...it's me, Sonic!" He winced at his choice of greeting as if he were being slapped already. _'Maybe it's not a good idea to let her know it's me, but still…I would've heard her say 'go away' or 'Get lost, Sonic' by now…'_

Sonic pounded against the door this time, but soon it flew open and hit the wall. He blinked blankly in the gesture of his fist knock and looked around the empty place.  
"Well now that's uncanny; her door's still unlocked?"

Sonic flattened himself against the wall and slinked down the hallway like a thief in the middle of the night. "A...Ames? Are you here? Please don't be hiding behind any doors to ambush and score me on the head with your mallet…"

He mentally shivered at the image.

Sonic paused when he saw the light and dancing shadows underneath her bedroom door.

He gulped and slowly set his fingers around the doorknob. "Amy? Are you in there?" his uneasy eyes found the red fluid seeping under the door.

His ears stood up erect. "AMY!" he barged the door down, assuming the obvious and the worst, "AMY--..." Sonic's ears sagged down just to find two black hedgehogs fighting to the death. "D-Daaaah...." Sonic sweat-dropped. "Two Shadows?" He scratched the top of his head, "Well _that's_ definitely not right…"

Shadow had his enemy pinned to the floor with one of Wrath's broken and elongated claws suiting up to skin Wrath's throat for that lovely red 'wine' Shadow so badly wanted to see. Wrath, however, was the first to see Sonic there looking completely confused and aggravated.

Shadow looked to his left to see his blue double as well. "...Sonic?" He suddenly twitched with anger. "What the hell!"

"...Okay, can somebody PLEASE explain to me what the heck's going on?!"

"Shut up, Sonic!" Shadow and Wrath both remarked.

Sonic withdrew. "SHESH, you two share looks as much as you do TEMPERS!" Though not one second short, Sonic's solemnity kicked in when the original quest to find Amy grasped back at him. He threatened them both, not out of resentment for neither, but stress, "..._Where's_ Amy?"

While Shadow had been distracted, Wrath used the time to kick Shadow off of him. "Ohhh, BLUE...you're a little LATE for the requiem!" A battered, bloody-faced Wrath made the move to confront and block Sonic from the view of Amy Rose.

Shadow on the other hand, tripped to Amy's side upon sensing his chance. His knees crawled into her blood as he collapsed on his hands beside her head. His iris sucked back as his horrified fingers stretched out to her face.

There was no Maria. Just Amy. A stepped-on Rose crushed into the Earth. The one who gave him the name, "Shadow _the Hedgehog_."

His fingers stopped their wobbling as they rested on her pink hair. He stroked the matted, blood-stenched tangles out of her eyes, his fingertips dyed in red, his teeth suddenly chattering against his growl.

"Mmph..." Amy's teeth bit together as she pants through her nostrils. "Sha-dow~...." the onslaught of tears streamed with the blood down her muzzle. "I...I-It...it hur--"

"Shhh," He placed his hand on her temple to silence her. "You _must_, stay, _strong_," he breathed out like he was being strangled, but tried to gulp down his building heart-attack.

Shadow shot his attention to the other black hedgehog for a long hateful stare deepening under his eyebrows.

The sound of more glass breaking caught Wrath's attention.

"Why that little SNAKE!" he yelled a moment before spinning around to visually meet his worst fears. But soon he wiped his mouth to reveal a smile. "…No, that's alright. This will do just fine. So let the sick games resume, so-called Shadow."

Without Chaos Control, he warped out of sight, leaving a very confused and pissed off Sonic screaming his lungs out for him to come back.

There was no need for Sonic to scream for answers or abuse and bend his foot by kicking the overturned dresser anymore when the thick, ear-pounding smell of blood tickled under his nose.

Shutting up, Sonic followed his nose and found the source of his nose's nightmare.

...He dabbed his hand on the carpet and lifted his fingers to his face to rub the blood between finger and thumb.

Fresh.

His other hand patted the carpet beside his foot to find the bracelet his foot had kicked when he stood up. He didn't bother looking for it with his eyes - he was slowly fighting with reality to convince himself that this wasn't happening, and that it wasn't real, and he'd wake up if he pinched himself.

When his fingers graced it, he gulped, unprepared to face the truth, but gripped it into his fist anyway. Clinching his eyes shut, Sonic reopened them upon the bracelet in his palm.

Amy.

...The bracelet hit the floor.

A drop of blood clung to the lip of windowsill before dropping away and 'pinging' off the bracelet.

The pinch didn't work.

* * *

**Attention: **I don't own 'Rouge's final report letter document'. KojiChao of the StH Area51 MB had translated a Japanese document that answers many secrets about Sonic Adventure 2 that weren't revealed in the English version for those who have only played the English version like meeee~.

It's a shame this story was written in 2004. Instead of having such a filter character like Wrath, Mephiles would've been the perfect object of the plot's affection. But there's no sense in changing everything now.


	8. Requiem For A Rose

**Chapter****: Requiem For A Rose**

**::Edit:: **_I apologize - the chapter got deleted! _

* * *

A shadow air-bladed down the row of sodium lamps; the street's lights dimmed upon the red smiles of blood grinning on the pavement.

Thunder beat on the clouds in the north--Thunder roiled on the underbellies in the south.

The skies bulked together to shape the head of Zeus roaring over the city.

It was coming.

...As 'Zeus's mouth' spun into a vortex of thunderclouds, showers and showers of lightning split down the heart of Station Square's sky like bloodlines severing the heavens in two.

The streetlamps' lightbulbs exploded into a thousand shatters of glass as lightning shot through them, one...by...one, one...by one, by _one, by one, by **one, by**_ **one**--people screaming and protecting their heads and loved ones, clawing at the glass sliced into their cheeks and necks, gurgling on the blood that bursted out of their throats.

The lamp-patterning blackout chased down the shadow faster and faster and faster until it was at his heels, tearing the street apart, ripping it into hurricanes of rocks, cement, cars, and people flying through the air.

...Wrath sat on the rooftop of a building with his Chaos Emerald held overhead. He smirked, before lowering the magical gem, and turning back to the darkness.

**~***

_'Sh-She's fine, she's not dying, she's fine, she's fine, she's FINE. She **WILL** be **FINE**!'_

Shit, where am I going...? Where the _FUCK_ am I going?!

My eyes are too raw to see a damn thing, the hail's leaving dents on my forehead, my brain's throbbing inside my skull, the wind's popping my ears, and all that chaos behind me; I can't fucking F-O-C-U-S.

All I'm breathing is the stench of blood on the pink and red slaughter-victim curled into my chest. Her warmth - it's_dying_. Her heartbeat - it's _s-slowing_. Her fingers, dirty with blood, are fisting in my chestfur, blooding its white, and I couldn't ask for more of a sign of life.

She NEEDS me. I can differenitate her hot tears from the cold rain and her dyin--...--_dehydrated_ rasping from the storm's howls.

My feet keep fighting against the chucks of hail that have no doubt left its welts on my eyelids and the hard rain that's numbed me all the way to the frozen cells.

_'I'm going to **CASTRATE** him, I'm going to **fucking** rip his testicles off and gag them down his throat!'_

I want to butcher something, anything, and ever-y-thing. I want to gorge someone's eyes out, decapitate their body parts, crack their head open, tear out their esophagus with my own bare teeth. I want to see someone's blood in place of hers, I want to take anyone else's life for hers! God DAMN it, I can hardly _breathe_...I'm seeing red, I'm grasping my own throat, all and everything is blurring into jittery pixels.

"Sh-Sha~dow~..." - That pulls me down to the world I was slowly leaving.

The Light.

I can feel more tears on my chest.

However, I couldn't rift my lips apart wide enough to soothe her with the lie that she'll be just fine, or manage to keep my irrationability stable enough to even sanitize myself.

I could only so much bark, "_Quiet_."

Don't talk. Breathe; don't waste what you have left.

Amy Rose clings to me tighter and whimpers out her sobs and fears. I cradle her to me closer and growl between my 'asthema' attack.

I long to be naive like you, Rose, to believe everything will be fine in the outcome. I long to hope so boundlessly, the hope I was once not so short of. I long for the day I believed in everything and...knew nothing at all.

My fingers dig into her skin. My eyes burn with passion, "You _will_ not die. Do you hear me?" ...I begin to feel this familiar, wet pressure on those same angry eyes as I snarl my hate for this twisted fate, "...You will not _die_."

Meanwhile, I wasn't watching the road. I didn't give a damn about that until I saw a set of headlights blind my vision into almost bleeding, but the second my pupils had abapted to extremity of the high-beams, the vehicle crashed right into me and...A-Amy! Shit!

Pulling her into me, Amy was well embedded into my chest as my body rolled and toppled over the hood of the god damn car and finally into the mud. The lightning that had tailed me down electorcuted the truck instead, causing it to explode into flames and scur into another car.

For a full ten seconds, I was hobbling up on my feet in a state of paralysis that rattled and delayed my nervals, causing me double over, and what's more, hallucinate stars and the sounds of bells.

Closing an eye from my wooziness and the pressure point in my broken rib, I limped to Amy Rose. Her head is snapped back, her eyes are rolling like marbles and she's shaking from head to toe, a physical state very similar to when Maria went through her seizures. My fingers, convulsing more than Amy's body, uncurled and ached to touch the dying girl, as though one touch from me would renew her health. I swallow deeper and taste my vomit, exaggerating my trauma even more when I snatch my fingers away from her at one single brush of her cheek against my fingertip.

She's cold...her flesh is going white...

I...I can't even...

_Fuck_, get moving, _Shadow_!

I shut my eyes and clear the child inside me, and haul Amy Rose up into my arms again.

Once I arrived at the City's famous house of recovery, I barged through the doors, standing there, drowning in the rain and a pink hedgehog's blood whose was over-flooding the white floor in red.

...The humans shrieked. They _shrieked_. _They_, **SHRIEKED**! They didn't even _h...elp_ me!

I run up and thrust Amy onto the counter where the nurses sat and sobbed, scattering the pen-holders and clip boards all over the front desk. One nurse looked up from her arms with a horrified face specked in Amy's blood.

"**Help** her," I panted through my fangs before opening my mouth big and wide, "_NOW_!"

"R...R-Right away, Mr. Sonic!" - She sure was taking her fucking time by just standing there!

"Are you blind, wench?!" I pound the counter with my fist and then wrestled the wench forward by her uniform's collar. "Do you see her?! I said LOOK AT HER! Do you see her?!"

She went on slobbering and sobbing, "Yes! Yes! YES!" as I gripped her by the scalp and shoved her face over to Amy's body, _forcing_ her to see this child DYING!

"LOOK at her! I said LOOK AT HER! Do you see her?! Yeah?! You see her?! Then **HELP. HER.**" I flung her back behind her desk, not caring if she broke a leg, a neck, I don't _CARE_.

Everyone's staring, everyone's gasping, everyone's clinging to each other in fear, but no one is HELPING me.

I turn to them all - the wounded, the sick, the dying, the workers - and scream in hysterics, "You god damn pathetic humans--_HELP_** HER**! Get someone and fucking _**HELP HER**_!"

Sprays of Amy's blood had peppered along my muzzle and fangs, making me look like the cannibal who had gnawed on the flesh that was gone from her, while being the savior caressing the back of her head into my chest, symbolizing the transition...and the affection.

For she will never mean nothing to me, in any lifetime, no matter what memories I would have lost. She has changed the course of my future on ARK, and she is changing it as we speak.

...We have met, and this is enough.

**~***

**Amy's Apartment - Guestroom**

...Sonic lifted Amy's bracelet to Tails, showing the fox all its blood and scuffed chippings.

"Amy was ATTACKED?!" Tails tossed the covers off him, though had to massage his ribs from the damage they'd endured earlier.

His eye pried open to look up at a frowning Sonic. The cornea was discolored, but the droopy eyelid had a black and purple bulge on it that looked like a tumor. His nose was smashed in and he was missing a fang, Sonic noted, in addition to the tip of his left ear that had been chewed off.

"...Yeah," Sonic's mouth hardly moved to the voice and his mind wasn't on the words he spoke.

Sonic had went on a one-man search party for hours and hours in the storm. He found no Shadow, and no Shadow-clone. He searched so long and hard, that he was now sick with a chest-cold and mild fever, and there was way in this world or the next he'd spend two seconds lying down in bed.

"I mean I..." Sonic sucked in a breath, slurping on some mucus. "I saw blood on the carpet after Shadow took her..." Sonic's eyes replayed the scene he was describing, and his glare sunk in deeper than it had been. "...Damn it..." he fisted his hand and talked through his teeth, "Just where in the heck did Shadow TAKE her?"

"Calm d-down...!" Tails sounded congested with mucus too, and sniffed some up. "Shadow probably took her to the hospital...! You already said there were two black hedgehogs in the same room, so my guess is..." Tails rubbed his runny nose. "That oher black hedgehog was the one who--"

"Did this to you..." Sonic's fist was shaking out of his self-control.

Tails tripped over his words to change the topic, "...This guy could be Eggman's newest android!"

Sonic's fist stopped shaking. "But Egghead can't design something so...close to the real thing. So life-like." Solemnity shone on Sonic's eyes, but it disspitated when he tapped on his skull to personify. "His brain's the size of an embyro, Tails!"

Tails kneaded his sprained ankle, trying to prevent the smile that wanted to split his face open at Sonic's joke, even if he wasn't trying to be funny.

Sonic heartened Tails with an awkward chuckle, but then cleared his throat when the silence grew just as awkward.

Shyly, Tails looked down, and the same glowing happiness he got in Mystic Ruins obtunded the pain he cramped with, but he pushed the happiness to the back of his mind and reminded Sonic after a few stutters and harrumphs of his own:

"E-Eggman is the only scientist around that could make something like this, though. We don't have any other leads. But you're right, he hasn't taken that far of a step like his grandfather."

Both companions either lowered their head or looked on, both evaluating and thinking about two different importances. Sonic's eyelids saddened over dull neon greens, and Tail's eyebrow squiggled down into a fraction of a frown.

Suddenly, "That might be it!"

Sonic's ears popped back up.

"It just might be the project G.U.N. had been keeping in lock-down secrecy for forty-one years. "

"...Wait, so," Sonic tilted his head with the higher ear twitching. "it isn't...you know, Gerald?"

"No way! Gerald didn't have time to be making two prototypes. There was only the Biolizard, and Project Shadow. And there's a reason Shadow's name was pre-fixed with 'Project' during the ARK era - he wasn't finished being created on the ARK."

"...So Shadow's not really...?"

"I really don't know. But, besides all that, since the Shadow we know is, in no shape or form, going to be ordered around by the government like he was supposed to be made for other than Maria's illness, G.U.N.'s been trying to replicate what Gerald's done. Shadow thinks too independently - the military had complained that Gerald practically gave him a soul, and you can't break a soul or a free will, to the government's misfortune. They tried using some of Shadow's DNA for their own project, but it had none of Shadow's internal uniquities - like artificial organs enhanced by technical manipulations, authentic but unlimited blood, Maria's transplanted heart - I know, that sounds gross, huh? - and liquid metal bone marrow. If Shadow still really thinks he's a machine OR a weapon of mass destruction, he's dead wrong, and has got to wake up and smell the roses one day. G.U.N.'s attempt was made from metal and that's it. Its brain was almost as unique as Shadow's, just not quite as intricate or so close to mundanity. And from what I've dug up, the project was becoming a major failure. They cancelled it because it had too many problems. It...thought like a child, then was as unpredictable as a rabid monster at one turn, and then malfunctioned into shooting sparks at another. The project was called,**_ 'Shadow Android.'_**"

"So in English, this guy is a rinky-dink, sleazy cloned version of Shadow built like a ton of 'internal' legos. But then how's it walking around and breathing if the project was cancelled, little buddy?"

Tails scratched his head guiltily, "I was just connecting some dots, Sonic. Maybe I'm wrong...we'll have to figure it out once we nab the guy, so then maybe I can run some tests on him? If we really want to be sure we need to ask Shadow."

Tails grinned, and ignored how much it ached his mouth's muscles to do so.

...Sonic nodded a slow, but sure enough uneager nod.

**(((((Eggman's Hidden Base)))))**

"Wrath, what in God's name happened to you?" Dr. Robotnik crossed his arms and bit the inside of his cheek; pissed. "You've wasted hours of my time having to give you a blasted FIX!"

The copy-hedgehog turned his head to the Doctor by an inch with a bored frown, but then smiled like a kitten getting his chin tickled.

The left side of his skull was plated in metal. The white of his eyeball having been drained of its color, was now raw, red, and plagued in myriads of tiny brown nerve vessels. His iris, no longer the oval characteristic of a hedgehog's eye, was the round orb of a robot's yellow sight-sensor. His arm, was now hairless and skinned, and nothing but bony metal. His ear was sliced neatly in half, but his other remained in tagged and twitching health.

...Dr. Robotnik's eyebrows shot up. He stage-whispered to the hedgehog swinging his legs back and forth on the tool-bench, "...Did Shadow do this to you?"

"Yes, quite the artiste, is he not?" Wrath tongued his eyeball to adjust it back in the socket, before licking around his mouth and blinking unevenly at the Doctor.

"Your face deforms itself with the more damage you take," Dr. Robotnik cleaned up his equipment. "Which means you're more useless than that Shadow. How do you plan to carry out my orders if you can't defeat one measly little hedgehog?! The next time you meet, you'll be pieces of scrap metal crushed under his foot!"

"Do, not...DOUBT me. I will strangle that damn hedgehog with his very own intestines and hang him on City Tower like a Christmas ornament, I will bring you his heart," Wrath bared his fangs at the Doctor. "So do not DOUBT me."

He tried to threaten his way to the Doctor's trust by deforming his frown into a blood-thirsty grin, but the expression was thrown into a fit of shock and helplessness as he looked down at his foot.

It was destroyed.

His nose wrinkled up in denial of the handicap. He shifted his body to walk on it, but ended up dragging the dead foot like a ton of steel-weight.

Dr. Robotnik just wagged a screw-driver at him, "HA! What were you going to do with that leg of yours?" His humor rotted into disgust, "Now get back on that table. I'm not finished with you yet." The Doctor turned back to his tool-selections. "Such cheap hardware would hardly pass as a creation built by my grandfather."

"...You must not like me very much..." Wrath's fingers slipped over the table. He brushed the backs of his fingers up and down the handle of the screw-driver. "...Do you, _Doctor_?" He clutched the handle tightly.

A fang-full grin stretched out his muzzle's skin.

**Hospital Room - 4:02am**

**~***

I sat outside Amy Rose's room, gripping at the armrests of the chair the doctors had restrained me into after thoroughly washing all the blood off.

I had fought to go in with her, and almost cost a few persistent humans their lives in the battle to reach Amy. She had been calling me, with her hand straining for me and her head limp and the tears soaking down her cheeks; she had needed me, because she was scared...but these damn humans and their damn rules.

The armests snapped into wooden splinters under my fingers, and I flung the chair at the wall in impatience of all this.

I paced up and down the hallway, itching to destroy a number of possible candidates in my path, but muzzled myself for the better good. I was at my boiling point, but I can harness this compulsion to kill for another time, and another person.

In what seemed to be the eleventh hour, the doctor came up to me with a sadistic smile.

Well, you bastard?! How is she?!

"Well, she's breathing, at least. She's lost an uncountable amount of blood, and though the blood transaction could only do so much for her, she's improved somewhat from when you brought her here on the..._counter_..."

Then he...

_Chuckled._

"..."

Feeling just how deep my frown is carving promises of a slow, agonizing death into him, he flipped through the forms on his clip board and adjusted his glasses. "A-Ah, she...yes, she's in a better state than she was, but she is still incredibly weak, and her heart-rate below average."

I growled out the a rage-a-holic I was, "And in other words, this means I can't see her at the moment, now doesn't it?"

"A...A-Afraid so, Mr. Sonic."

I reached for his white collar this time and tore him into me, making sure he'd feel my very breath burn the flesh off his cheekbones, "**Don't**...call me that…"

"F-Forgive me Sonic," He grinned ear to ear, his glasses lopsided on his face. "I-I-I-I-I...surely didn't mean to offend you…!"

My eyebrow twitched. There might have been a busted blood vessel in my eye. _'You just DID!'_

I shoved him to the floor and walked off, trying to work out the knots of stress cramping my neck. Her being alive and well has rehabiliated me to an extent, but I still can't seem to hold back my bloodlust.

I need to see her, to hell with hospital regulations. My intuition is demanding that I need to see her. I nor know or trust these humans, no matter what their profession and duty, and I'll believe their pretend-concern once I see her for myself.

When all the nurses and doctors were cleared out of the hall, I slipped into her room and closed the door behind me with a soft "click", leaving my antipathy behind me, and replacing it with a...less-heavy, but sinking feeling.

There she was, sleeping in a bed with blood-bank-bags and tubes taped to her forearms, paler than the dead, grayer than pink.

I swallowed something thick, and I took a few steps further, but once I took just one step the images of Maria taking her last dying breath struck at me. I stood there feeling cross inside at similarities I wished not to make, but continued on.

When I reached her, I ignored the stool that would grant me rest and stood at her bedside. The beeping of her pulse on the machine made the air more morose and deader than it should've been, and I suddenly did not know what to say...what to do...

Should I watch her in her sleep, admiring the lighting and shading effects of the hospital's flickering lights on her face's proportions, or...?

Mm...

I close my eyes and gather up my regrets.

"Amy Rose…" I whisper, but since whispers of mine are never soft, it sounds more like a barrel. "…If you're awake…" my hands itch to be elsewhere, as does my body, "You'd be ready to know that I did not intend for any of this to befall you." My fists close. "This...is not what I had wanted, for _anyone_."

She breathed, in and out, an up and down of the chest, a rasp, a cough, then a hum.

She was listening, I was certain. Decisions rangled me.

What more will be brought on, if my enemies choose to target someone else who is involved in my life - a damsel in distress no less?

My hand is at it again; the finger-pads are a breadth's way from touching the wild pink bangs that beg for a comb and relaxer. More warmth melts my corpuscles and break me off from my sense of...sense as the tickly sensation of her hair beneath my finger frazzles me into a daze. Just one stroke, to imprint my care, that I do think highly of her, for it would be preposterous to deny otherwise.

The foolish girl has pleaded action upon action to be a part of me and my oppression. She has made it her New Year's Resolution to make my rock hard frown be friends with her flexible little smiles, then compliment each other with our dissimilarities and console the other with our similarities.

Perhaps I have met my match in stubbornness.

Perhaps I am her reality-check.

Perhaps that if I linger here in a hospital room muggy with her hot breath spinning off a million repetitions of 'perhaps', these wants will become needs and she'll haunt me, awake or sleep.

"...Amy...?" I've only heard my voice sound this way just before Maria's death - scared, weak, regretful, hoping...the voice of a child.

There I go, making the analogies.

Amy didn't come to life for me again; no hand-squeezing or uttering sobs, just the stabile elevations of her chest.

I withdraw my hand and turn my palm over and looked into its geometric patterns.

I...experience an overwhelm of alienation all of the sudden; this body...it...doesn't feel like it's mine. These hands that are mine, do not feel like hands of destruction. It's as though, I've forgotten that person - The Ultimate Lifeform. And am now, in place of him..._me._

I jump when Amy begins slurring and whimpering things to me in her subconsciousness I couldn't hear loud enough.

My hand had been beside hers but not touching hers, yet she's here enough to snag onto that hand and squeeze the fingers.

I remind myself of the things she has said, the things I have memorized to heart:

_"I know people do the most trivial things, and some people~...may be selfish, like the Professor said, but they're basically good, if they never give up on their wishes. They always have a reason to be happy!"_

...I shut my eyes. _'Does this, apply to me too? ...Am I, basically good, because I have once been selfish, just like these humans?'_

_ "You won't be lost like that forever. You were given a second chance because you needed and deserved it, maybe? All you had to go through...that you survived and stuff, rewarded you with a chance to live a better life now. You can be...whomever you __want__ at this point. You can pick anything you like. The present and the future are everything. It's like...it's like you're finally free! No orders, promises, or missions! You can make up your own...for, well...well for __you__, I guess. So you can't mope about it. You have to get out there and make the best of it!"_

My eyebrows soften some...the lines of a frown reduced by just a bit.

What a character you are, Amy Rose.

I stroke her knuckle with my thumb, shakily and unsure of myself.

...Love...

My ears droop.

Friendship...

All the things, that I_ fear_, and have forgotten how to express_..._

Do not matter anymore. All that matters, is that this fragile girl before me who has given me that second chance to believe in hope once more, is now clinging onto that little bit of life, and must be protected.

I squeeze her hand back with sudden determination.

She **must** be protected.

Closing my eyes, I bow my head in a silent prayer, _praying._..that she will make it through this night. I bow my head in silent prayer, _returning_...the hope that she's taught me to believe. I bow my head in silent prayer, to the only phenonmenon I believe in:

"...Maria," I look into the lights of the hospital room with half-lidded eyes, and try to whisper through my lips, something passionate without my throat swelling up, "..._Please_...."

I rest my hand on Amy's forehead. She pushes out a sigh.

"..._Watch_ over her for me, until my return..." I tilt my head back down to Amy Rose, hoping I can restore the damage that has been done with, "...I have been here for you, and you will know this when you awaken." - With that, I steal my hand away from her, from the warmth that drugged me into obsession, and turned for the window.

As I gaze down on the bright lights of the illuminated city below, I begin to entertain myself with a sorrowful conclusion. I have been lost in the dark, and so had Amy, and unpredictably, we bumped into each other in that dark, and her fingertips had brushed my knuckles. Nothing more. That was...our relationship. Subtle, yet powerful.

As I was about to wrench her window open, I heard her faintly call to me, "…Sh...adow...give y...yourself a ch-chance...to be happy…"

Not 'them', but 'yourself'.

I spun around in hopes of meeting an awake Amy, to trip back into my sins and attach myself to herself until the gap closes, until we're no longer subtle, to object everything I stood for, everything that is my phobia, but all I saw was her sleeping form lying peacefully in that bundle of covers.

I hear the blood in my ears. The sweat on my palms. My heart pounding. Too fast and too slow. She knows what to say to make me go _wild_--

--No. That's enough.

I shook my head and pinpointed my newest purpose. Assassinate and dismember that fucking bastard for all it's worth. I'm not taking revenge because I have misunderstood Amy's wish, this is for my own hands, to stain them with that fucker's blood, and it's going to be a gory, artistic massacre...

The nerves under my grin are twitching with mania.

There **will** be blood.

**~***

**Amy's Apartment**

Tails had pressed Sonic to move them into Amy's bedroom. It was just a stab in the dark, but Tails had suggested Shadow might return, and tried to clean the damage-level as much as he could.

"Ugh," Sonic's head lolled back as he slumped in Amy's chair. "Come on, Tails~, just WHY exactly would Shadow come back here to begin with? Not to mention my legs are startin' ta' get BUTTERFLY-cramps from being in one spot for too long, and this room is--" Sonic's eye caught a flash of green in Tails's hand. "Eh?"

Tails winked, "Shadow forgot his Chaos Emerald."

And right on time, came the crashing of Shadow the Hedgehog entering the building.

Tails and Sonic recovered from dodging all the glass from the window to look over their arms and gape at him. The black hedgehog didn't look happy, either.

"Listen up," Shadow ordered and started giving them at the drop of a dime, "I know you have a Chaos Emerald radar," his finger panned between Sonic and Tails, before all five curled into a fist, "and I need it right this minute, no questions asked."

"Yeesh," Sonic fingered his ear, trying to get over his old and mistaken bitterness toward Shadow. "You'd think the Sheriff here would know how to say 'please'."

Shadow advanced on him, "I'm not here to play games with you, blue hedgehog."

Sonic raised a bored eyebrow at the dominating rage he spoke with.

"Sure, pal," he welcomed without a smile, "But first you gotta tell us where Amy is, and where this clone-you happens to be hidin' out. Then we can talk business."

For a long pause, Shadow just stared the hedgehog down. A frown cut deeper between his eyebrows.

He then muttered with a fairly controlled tone, "...Have you not patched up all you need to patch, before you can admit to giving me an apology?"

At that, Sonic's ears flattened and his mouth twisted up like he was going to be sick. Not from disgust or humor, but from guilt. Sonic opened his mouth just to stutter.

"Hold your tongue, Sonic. I shall save you the embarrassment." Still not blinking, Shadow reported Amy's welfare to his audience, "Amy is currently being held at a hospital, out of harms way for a short period of time. If I don't get that device now, that short period of time will be up."

Tails rubbed his chin and hummed his brain-stormings, "So I see...Shadow, maybe--"

"Since when did you decide to make yourself Amy's body guard?" Sonic devastated Shadow with an all-serious and disturbed look on his face.

"So you choose to retort to enemies once more instead," Shadow took a readying step onward.

"...That's not what I'm saying," Sonic's head sunk sideways as he squinted out his attempt to read Shadow. "Just..." he talked with his hands; trying to get the right words. "...Just, just when did all this happen, y'know?" He laughed at nothing funny. "When did you and Amy get so close...?"

Something in Shadow's eyes came alive. A feeling being relived. A memory.

Sonic's eyes widened as he tried to name the passion he'd only seen in Shadow's when he had been fueled with revenge, a purpose, to be frank, and an intense emotion, to be specific.

"U-Uh, Shadow?" Tails stepped in. He had never really had to talk to the black hedgehog one on one before. "How about...we all just help each other? I mean, we have your Chaos Emerald too."

Tails teased Shadow's eyes with the Chaos jewel's emerald, but Shadow just smirked, finding the manipulation of the deal funny.

"I could snatch that right out of your little palm, Fox boy," Shadow opened his eyes to him after humoring himself. "And take the radar along with it.

"...Yeah there is that too, huh?" Tails sweat-dropped.

"Hear me when I say this, because I will only say this once," Shadow's chest puffed out as he stood tall and superior to roar, "This is between Wrath and I, and no one else. This is _my_ business, and if I need to persuade you to cooperate with my demands by force to take _care_ of that business, I will not hold back."

"Oh cut it out, Shadow," Sonic flung his hand out. "Amy's in this, and she's more than OUR business, she's our FRIEND, so this is more than just you and the score you have to settle! This is about Amy too!" Sonic's lecture-tone started to die as his voice grew sick with more emotions, "...And you know neither one of us can get her out of this with a one-man-only ego."

Shadow's lip ticked as well as his self-restraint, "...How dare you mock my agenda, Faker--"

"Wait, hold the phone, you guys!" Tails poked his index fingers together. "...Y-You see, Shadow, we have the radar, but..." Tails shut his eyes tight with his face flushed over in his embarrassment. "...i-it's at the Mystic Ruins in my Workshop, and it needs to be fixed!"

Shadow just about detonated like a bomb, "...Was that supposed to be FUNNY?!"

...It was the first time Sonic had laughed in a long~ time.

"...Hmph," Shadow whirled to the side and crossed his arms, eyes shut and nose snubbed down, "Shut up, _Faker_." He lazily peeked back at the hysterical Sonic, the corner of his mouth being tugged at by a...well, _almost_ a smirk.

**Hospital Room**

**~***

_"You know, I~ think_ [[[think]]]_ it's time_ [[[time]]]._..to get up now_ [[[now]]]..."

I hear a girl giggling. An echo of a girl, I think. But, I can't see her. Everything is..._black_, just...just the kind of black that has no ceiling, no floor, no walls, no gravity, and your body isn't really...isn't really _there. _When you look down, there are no hands or feet to look down on, because you're not a part of this place, you're just a spectator of it. That's how I feel.

_"Shadow would be so happy_ [[[happy]]] _if you woke up..."_

This girl I keep hearing, she sounds so sad and happy all in one take. She sounds like a ghost on a broken tape recorder.

"..._And we want Shadow_ [[[Shadow-Sha-Sha-Shadow]]] _to be happy, right?_"

I imagine her trying to smile all her sadnesses away and try to hide all fifty-one of them away from me, if I could see it.

_"...Because he's dreaming_ [[[dreaming - oh, he's dreaming]]] _again._"

"...I know you..." - I heard myself say in my head. "You're...that girl...Shadow's, 'little sister'..."

The picture starts to paint itself in the darkness like that was the password needed. I can now see her face, or rather, her eyes, but I couldn't see anything below the 'V' groove of her lip. She's looking down, and her brown eyelashes are dipping into eyes that aren't looking at me; each lash curled, each lash thick and perfect, and the blonde strands that fell in between those lashes made her look like a live portrait with cute little freckles on the bridge of her little nose. It was like a camera had switched to 'zoom' to home in on her melancholic eyes like in one of those sentimental music videos you see on MTV.

Then she looks up at me, with the flitter of her pretty lashes, and I see that her eyes are blue like the sky.

How pretty.

I see her freckly cheeks dimple, like maybe she's smiling at me and I just can't see it, _"...He dreams about what his future would look like if he could just have a conservation with you every day in pure isolation...without a care in the world. You're like his fairytale. With you, reality doesn't mean anything anymore. He's half-awake to that realization. It's in his subconscious, but he has a clue of it."_

...R...Really?

I see the back of her fingertip press against the groove of her lip, and then a, _"Shhh...it's our little secret_ [[[secret-s-s-secret]]]."

...And then it goes black again. The darkness beings to peel apart when I open my eyes, and I--...wait...

I'm... - I blink - I'm awake...

I gasp and touch my face.

I'm alive! That must mean that evil Shadow look-alike was defeated!

"Shadow!" I toss the sheets off my legs and unfold them off the bed to climb out. The mattress springs up as my head leaves the pillow. "A-Ah!" I bite my lip in pain to stop the tears from squirting out.

Once I look down, I saw the glitch - my shoulder's stitches are torn apart, my side feels like I've been h-hit by a Rhino, and I've got tubes and wires and needles and...all these weird hospital-things attached to me everywhere. I've never been in the hospital before, and I couldn't help but feel like some lab experiment.

I clap my hand over the wound and duck my head down, whimpering against my lips, "...Mmm...Sh-Shadow...where'd you go?" My body hurts so b-bad. I take another look around, but because everything's so blurry and my eyes feel like they're imaging objects. "Shadow?" I'm panicking, and I feel it rise up my throat. "Sh-Shadow?"

I'm scared to be alone when I'm this handicap, and he LEFT me here all alone! Shadow, I know you brought me here, so why'd you leave? Why are you and Sonic always leaving?! I raise my head up high to get a hold of myself; gotta be strong, gotta be strong. My head's already starting to feel funny from jumping up so quickly, at that. In doing so, I saw something I never thought I'd see again, lying there on the table-lamp beside me.

Two roses, one red and one white, entangled in each other's stems, and they look so in love...

My eyes washed over with tears. He knew what those meant to me...oh, he knew. I hobbled as far as I could with all the equipment attached to me and cradled the roses' buds once I reached them. He didn't leave; he just...heh, he just left something behind. Something that says he'll come back really, really soon.

"...Thank you, Shadow…thank you so much," I tuck the roses into my chest and hug them, smiling wider than I've ever smiled before, even if all my tears are bouncing off the roses' petals.

...I'll never let anything happen to you, roses. I promise.

**~***

Feeling particularly heaven-sent and magical that he had her feelings in mind before he left, Amy limped back to the bed and crawled under the covers with her roses.

The small hand on the clock ticked around the digits.

Tick.

...

Tick.

...

Tick.

...

---Amy's sudden gasp blubbers into a blood-gushing scream. The tiny hospital vase meant for her flowers broke at the sonar-screech of the scream. Legs and arms kicked and thrashed about underneath the bleeding sheets as the bed squeaked and bounced. Sick laughter fell in sync with the the sobbing, until the mattress was sliced open.


End file.
